


Hinges and Gyres

by MotherInLore



Series: Slayers West [8]
Category: Always Coming Home - Ursula K. Le Guin, Slayers (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Magic, Past Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-05-05
Packaged: 2018-10-28 00:36:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10820049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MotherInLore/pseuds/MotherInLore
Summary: There may not be a lot of magic beyond the Barrier, but there's enough for Zel to make a try at a cure.  And for Xellos to make trouble.





	1. Winding the Spring

**Author's Note:**

> For those of you who are new to _Slayers West,_ , my OC has two names, depending on whether one is speaking the lingua franca or not. "Swallow of the Serpentine House" is the Kesh translation and how she thinks of herself. If one doesn't know the language, it sounds like "Wehisho Sudrevidovmav," which is how the gang knows her, except for Xellos, because Mazoku.
> 
> None of the references to past incidents are at all graphic, but I've added the warning for those who need to know.

_What word, Lieutenant?_

Even with the advantages of Astral travel, the journey from the physical town of Choum Rekwit to the metaphysical redoubt of Wolf Pack Island was exacting. But She had called him, and he had come.

“The cities of Sann and of Loss are all part of Dolphin's territory now, under a shallow sea,” Xellos told Her. In this place, for now, he kept his eyes open; he needed to catch any nuance She might emit. “The remaining humans are, for the most part, dedicated anarchists. Their power structures are deliberately unstable and intermixed, and they are culturally resistant to mass movements. Accomplishing small things among them would be very simple. Making any serious use of them would not be worth the effort.”

_And what of the City of Mind?_

“The City of Mind is... quiescent, for now. Your sister has even found ways to make use of it, for recruitment and communication, though neither the recruits nor the communication are of very high quality. But the City could be very dangerous indeed. Like the Zanafars, it has no Astral presence at all, nor vulnerabilities on that side. It is oriented entirely toward Order, and appears to be unmoved by bribes, threats, or bargains. It is capable of detecting and deducing vast amounts of information, and it does not keep secrets from anyone that asks.” The process of asking was not particularly simple, of course, but that didn't mean a really determined dragon, or at least one chimera Xellos knew of, wouldn't do it. He went on.

“Within its sphere of influence, it has a symbiotic relationship with the local humans which enables them to communicate very, very rapidly, to say nothing of using its other resources. It has enormous and subtle influence on the balance of power anywhere its outposts are located. And it has begun building a new outpost in Seyruun.”

_Disruptive._

“Very. As an entity, the City appears to be even more passive than the Ancient Dragons, but by all appearances, this is not a matter of principal so much as a lack of fear. It simply does not fear anything anyone else can do to it. I begin to wonder if the Hellmaster's Barrier was, in part, an attempt to keep out the City; its advance elsewhere seems to have been inexorable.” 

_Can it be stopped?_

She meant, stopped independently of the world ending. Ending the world was always the long-term goal, but... Xellos let himself smile, and half-closed his eyes. “Why, yes!” he told Her, “When I said the City does not keep secrets, I meant it. It told me exactly how to destroy it, when I asked, and I believe it is possible. At a price.” He fluttered his hands to indicate floating caveats.

_What price?_

He shrugged. “If it works? Me, for a start, together with a number of lesser mazoku. This attack will shift one of the major powers of the world, and it will require sacrifice. Morevover, the process will not, of course, be a simple one. All that power, all needing to be focused so precisely. To act on the physical plane to that degree, we will need humans. And because the City does not threaten as the Zanafars did, we will need _misguided_ humans.”

He did not belabor this point; the central dilemma was a secret even to lesser mazoku. Xellos was not entirely certain even he had been supposed to know, except he had seen it in action. Mazoku might chant, “By our own strength and will,” but human will, on the rare occasions when they chose to exert it, shaped power as Mazoku could not. For an all-out attack, widespread destruction, the Greater Beast's power rivaled that of any dozen volcanoes. But when raw power was not the issue; when precision was needed... You can't cut a thread with a volcano. Even the Chaos Mother could be shaped by human purposes, up to and including love. He had seen it with his own eyes, though he contemplated the disturbing implications as rarely as he could manage. Nonetheless, destroying the Terrestrial Cybernet, as the City of Mind called itself, without destroying the rest of the world (which would not have been a problem if they could manage it, but so far they hadn't) would require a level of focused intervention on the physical plane that absolutely demanded the use of humans. And to do so when the humans were focused on some other purpose...

_Show me how, She commanded._

Xellos bowed himself into a less human shape, and slunk to Her feet, pressing his head up against Her hand. Their communication became wordless for a time, as possibilities and intersections manifested themselves. If the Chaos Words from this ancient ritual were to be invoked, including their unusually open-ended invitation, their emphasis on the concept of reversal... If such a one's power could be increased unexpectedly, so that she wasn't prepared for it... If this other one's hatred of the stones that clung to him could be linked with the Earth itself... if the ritual were timed for the changing of the tides- the simple ones of water and the deeper ones of lava...

_I see. And some of the residual effects would also be most desirable._

“I thought that might interest You,” Xellos said, still beneath Her hand.

_Yes. And The Inverse would be... preoccupied, as well, would she not?_

The hand lifted. Xellos sat back, returning to his usual shape, sitting upright on his knees before Her. “She would. Though she has been useful, from time to time.”

_Not useful enough. She has thwarted Us too often. And if We needed her, there would be ways..._

Xellos said nothing, only waited.

Lord Beastmaster was patient, and could move slowly and subtly. But She never dithered. It took very little time for Her to come to Her conclusion and issue Her command: _Yes. This is a worthy use of your power. Go forward, Lieutenant; I will bear your many useful qualities in mind when I spawn your replacement._

And so Xellos had begun his last campaign. In a way, it had begun before he knew it was one. Lina the Inverse, with her gift for coincidences, had managed in her latest journey to pull in a woman who not only knew the Carrion Gyre, but had a theology that embraced Lord Beastmaster – at least in Her more frivolous moods – and an abiding hatred of cities that would not spare even Seyruun. That Swallow of the Serpentine was also a firm friend of the City of Mind, and given, moreover, to irritatingly dismissive remarks about the nature of sacrifice, heroism, and power, well, Xellos had no reason to think they would be any more of a barrier to accomplishing his ends than was the Princess Amelia's more familiar brand of idealism. His final act was going to be a real work of art, satisfying on every level. He set to work with even greater cheer than usual.

 

****

Somehow, they just didn't seem to be able to pull themselves away from Choum-Rekwit. Amelia grew more and more anxious as time went on, pushed by the horrible, ambiguous prophesy: _Seyruun needs 'wudun' before it falls into the sea._ The likeliest candidate for "wudun" was an Exchange Node of the Terrestrial Cybernet, also known as an Exchange with the City of Mind. _Wudun_ was a word for exchange in one of the local languages, Kesh. Xellos kept hinting that they should all go to the Na Valley, where that language was spoken, instead of relying on just one young Kesh trader who knew the word, in case the prophesy was pushing them toward something else. Neither Amelia nor anyone else was keen on the idea. The City of Mind had promised, through the Exchange at Choum-Rekwit, that Seyruun would have its own Exchange within just over a year, so some of the urgency had slackened, but not all. Because if "wudun" was the Exchange, that meant it was Seyruun, not wudun, that was supposed to fall into the sea...

But they didn't seem to be able to pull away from Choum-Rekwit. First there were the _woudan_ plant seeds that they were waiting for, being shipped in from the “Always Fog Coast,” just in case. That took several weeks, although privately, Amelia was sure it was a dead end. Nobody in this part of the world seemed to think the seeds were worth anything. And now, even after the seeds were here and stowed safely away, they lingered, growing tense and cranky with each other in the late summer heat, all of them weary from the months of traveling.

Even attempts to arrange transportation led to arguments and delays. Another possible wudun candidate was an unspecified person along the so-called “Hurricane Coast.” Which meant taking a sea route for a while instead of the overland one that had brought them all here. Was anyone sailing south this time of year? Well, if this was hurricane season it made sense not to, she had to admit. Was there a “train” that went in that direction? Especially one with the fire-and-water driven engine that went twenty miles an hour all day? _Yes,_ Amelia realized that once Seyruun had an Exchange the City of Mind could give them schematics for every train engine ever built or imagined; she just thought it would be good to ride one, once. No mechanical trains in wildfire season, just mules. Oh. Well, that made sense, too. And still they lingered....

Lina was even touchier than usual, and Gourry had taken to watching her with a mournful expression whenever she didn't seem to be looking. Amelia had a sneaking suspicion that their relationship had hit a rough patch, and she thought she knew why. It wouldn't take long for Love to Triumph, she was sure. But in the short term, it meant Lina was tearing over the hillsides searching for treasure, and wasn't inclined to head back toward Seyruun yet, even when Amelia argued that they'd be taking a different route, so there'd be plenty of opportunity to hunt new treasures as they went. Lina just snarled, inhaled another couple of roasted chickens, and stalked off to try and browbeat the machines of the Exchange into giving her another map.

Amelia sighed. “Maybe we should just tie her up and carry her off,” she suggested to Zelgadis. “We've done it before.”

Zel's mouth quirked in agreement, but then he, too, sighed. His gazed absently across the inn courtyard, following Lina's disappearing back. “I'm... really reluctant to leave off my research here,” he said. “I mean, yes, there's going to be an Exchange in Seyruun by the time we get back, or soon after, but... you know that point in a spellcasting where it's almost done but if you get interrupted you have to start all over again from the beginning? I feel like I'm this close to a breakthrough. He held his fingers just far apart enough to have a visible gap between them. “If you wanted to start off without me, though, I'd understand.” 

“Umm...” Amelia didn't like that idea at all, but she had to admit there was some logic to it. “I notice Wehisho-san's talking about going home to her Na Valley as well.”

“Quite right, too,” Xellos murmured, drifting up to their table with teapot in hand. “You don't really need a guide here anymore. However,” He smiled a little more broadly at them both as he set the pot down and settled himself onto the bench, “Before she leaves, Zelgadis-san, you really should ask her how her people would treat a case like yours. I do believe you would find the answer... enlightening.”

Zelgadis glared at the mazoku. “Don't start. I know for a fact that there are no chimeras in the West, so they don't have a cure. Also, anything you suggest in that tone of voice is automatically a bad idea.”

Xellos tutted. “How soon we forget. Or are you suggesting that defeating the Ghost of Shabranigdo was actually a bad idea after all? Even the dragons know it can be advantageous to listen to a mazoku from time to time, Zelgadis-san. And with regard to the peoples around the Omorn peninsula and the Inland Sea...” The mazoku tilted his head downward and half-opened his eyes, smirking. “As I have said before: they may not have magic, but their ancestors did. Many of the great rituals around here are built around Chaos Words.”

Zelgadis hunched his shoulders and said nothing, but Amelia could see that Xellos had hit his target.

 

***

Lina woke from her nap to discover Wehisho sitting next to her under the eucalyptus tree, idly weaving the dried leaves into little shapes. The leaves tended to crumble if they were folded too hard, and none of the shapes resembled anything much to Lina's bleary eyes. As Lina blinked herself back into the world and sat up, the dark hands stilled and Wehisho spoke.

“Lina,” she said, “I have something a little awkward to talk about with you.”

“Yeah?”

“Indeed,” Wehisho told her solemnly, “It touches on a matter or two that people tend to feel strongly about, and where the taboos vary widely from place to place and from people to people, so please understand that I am not trying to transgress. But it's important that you know: if you need an abortificant, I can get it for you, and I can see you through the use of it. The Rekwit people are quite straightforward about such things. They won't think less of you or give you any trouble.”

Lina blinked, then stared, her face reddening. Suppressing a panicked _how did you know,_ she sputtered, instead, “You think I'd – How- how dare you even suggest–” she wanted to call up another Fireball, but she'd already toasted Gourry twice that day and various townspeople three or four times, and she didn't want their local guide to abandon them to an angry mob right when That-Time-of-the-Month hit – and it would, any day now, she was sure. She was just a little late.

Wehisho shrugged. “I told you it was awkward to talk about. And if I've insulted you, I'm sorry. Only, if it had been something other than the long time in one town that was making you irritable, or something other than the summer heat making you tired in the middle of the day, it's the sort of thing you might need to know: No one here is going to fault a woman for choosing not to undertake such a momentous change this far from home, and the herbs they use are not particularly dangerous. I've used them myself, to bring my courses on when I wasn't quite sure. The cramps are pretty bad for a couple of days, but not as bad as the worry about the other.”

“Get away from me.” Lina's eyes darkened, and she started to gather power in one of her hands.

Wehisho got. She was a little surprised at the violence of Lina's reaction, under the circumstances. _Maybe she's one of those people who thinks souls come into the womb right away. I can see how that kind of idea would make everything harder_. The notion was foreign to the Na Valley, and the few people who had heard of it would call it superstition. But Wehisho had seen and heard enough from other peoples to know that theories of the soul varied widely, and that much of the variation supported the comfort of those living in the Five Houses of the Earth in a variety of situations. In the places on the Omorn peninsula and around the Inland Sea, Na and Rekwit rivers included, the poisoned legacy of the Lost Cities meant that the conception rate was low, and the ratio of live births to conceptions even lower. To imagine souls coming and going from a womb so quickly and often would have been agonizing, and with miscarriages common, enforcing an abortion taboo would have been next to impossible. _But it sounds like the land is much cleaner there inside the Cyst, even if the people all have their heads on backward. Maybe souls act differently there._

“Wehisho, can I talk to you?”

It was not Lina, recovered from her panic-driven temper, but Zelgadis, come out of the Exchange and into the open air before sunset for the first time in nearly a month. Wehisho remembered that she, too, when she had first started talking to the machines, had been half drunk with it, with all the swirling knowledge that seemed to be only a hand's reach away. After a while it wore off, when it became clear how much work it was to find the information inside the piles of numbers the Exchange liked to build, and when Wehisho realized she'd much rather talk to people. But some other scholars stayed entranced, she knew, and they did good work, of their kind. “Would you like to take a walk?” she asked. “And would you rather risk sunstroke, or malaria?” She gestured up the dusty hills, and down toward the green ribbon of cattails that marked the river, and then, belatedly, remembered that mosquitoes were probably not of great concern to Zelgadis.

“Sunstroke, actually,” Zelgadis answered easily. “The the main room of the Exchange is cold.” So they chose a path that climbed past the milkweed fields, now all shorn down to a low scruff of sliver-gray leaves, after the rubber harvest and the floss harvest. Only a few plants, here and there, had been left to grow leggy and spread their puffs of seeds across the fields for the next year. The path was dusty enough that Wehisho drew a scarf across her nose, just as Zelgadis did, for his own reasons.

“What is it?” she asked after a time.

Zelgadis turned to look at her. “I know you said there are no chimeras in the West,” he began, “but if what happened to me did happen to someone in the Valley, what would you do?”

Wehisho scowled over her scarf, and demanded, “Did Coyote's Son put you up to this?” At Zelgadis' confirming twitch, she went on, “Because, he has come to me a time or two since we arrived in Choum-Rekwit, with vague threats to my home and family if I do not tell you some things that are not really mine to share. I thought perhaps he had finally let it drop. Or that he was letting me stew, one or the other.”

_And if Xellos is involved..._ Neither one spoke the thought aloud, but it hung in the air between them. They were both silent for a while, ceding the air to the buzz of the cicadas and the high, nervous pulse of the crickets. A dog barked somewhere in the town below them. The footpath leveled out and limned the top of the highest of the terraces. Below them to the left were the cultivated fields and the tile roofs of Choum Rekwit. On the other side, a few walnut trees pocked a sweep of grass pasture, and above the pasture the chaparral began again. Wehisho, having considered, spoke again.

“To answer your question fully is to go beyond my learning,” she told Zelgadis. “My family are almost all doctors, but I stopped studying with that lodge when I began working with the Finders, and they mostly do not talk shop in front of me.” Wehisho suspected privately that her mother made a point of this professional silence in part to punish her daughter for choosing such a dangerous and disreputable profession as the Finders, thereby upsetting many of Agate's treasured plans. But that was an old fight, and Wehisho didn't care any more. “So bear that in mind;” she told Zelgadis, “my guesses may or may not be useful to you.”

The chimera's expression rarely changed, but his posture was eloquent, and now it tightened like a bowstring, or a mousing cat, listening.

“No two bringings-in are exactly alike,” Wehisho went on, “But if we made one – or more than one, probably, over the course of a year or two – for you, my guess is that it would have a lot in common with the treatments for other people whose souls have been marked by trauma – hunters who lost their companions when things went wrong, for instance, or people who have been raped. We don't have many cases like that, but every few years... There would be rituals of purging, casting off the hold of the ones who hurt you, and rituals for reclaiming the use of your body for yourself, for your own use and pleasure and care. The _dwesh_ would also want to address any tendency to take on more guilt than is truly yours.” 

She watched Zelgadis unclench his hands. “That... makes sense, I think,” he said. 

Wehsisho went on, “There are certain drugs we use for trance and visions; mostly during the Twenty-One Days of the Sun _Wakwa_ , but they can also be employed to help people revisit and integrate troubling memories. Those are very dangerous to use without expert help, so don't.” At his acknowledging nod, she added, “Later on, you would probably be brought in again to deal with some of the more long-term scars on your souls, like your unwillingness to make big choices, or the difficulty you have trusting people.”

Zelgadis bridled at this. “I know about the trust thing, but where the hell did you get the idea that I'm indecisive?” he demanded. 

“Not indecisive,” Wehisho corrected, “passive. The big choices, not the little ones. It seems to me that you have done very little thinking about who you wish to be or how; you decide who you will follow instead. Amelia and her quest now. Lina before that, or so she tells me.”

“You don't understand at all,” Zel muttered at the ground, and then brought his head back up to glare at her. “And what about the months and years I spent on my own, looking for my cure?”

Wehisho's eyes above her patterned scarf were mild. “Well, those times you were following your grandfather, were you not? Not in obedience, to be sure, but it was his choices that determined what you did.” She spoke with some sympathy, which Zelgadis didn't hear. “Remaking a stolen part of yourself is very difficult, but in the long run it's better than running after the thief.”

“You don't understand at all,” Zelgadis repeated, bitterly, and strode back down the way they'd come, toward the town and the Exchange.

 

***

Amelia healed Gourry again from the effects of Lina's most recent fireball and shook her head at the other sorceress' back as she went whirling away. So did Gourry, looking like a bewildered puppy. “Do you know what's bothering her, Amelia?”

“Not for sure, Gourry-san, but I guess it must be important. The only times I've seen her this bad before was when you'd gone missing somewhere – the time Hellmaster kidnapped you, and later when you were living with the Fish people.”

Gourry scratched his head. “When was that?”

Amelia smiled fondly. “Never mind... those times, she was worried about you and trying to pretend she wasn't.”

“But I'm right here!” Gourry wailed. “She won't even talk to me!”

“I know...” Amelia patted the swordsman on the shoulder, comfortingly. She so wanted to help her two friends recognize the Power of Love, and it was so, so tempting to just do that one spell on Lina when she was asleep, just to see if Amelia's suspicions were correct. _But that would break my Shrine Maiden vows about patient consent, and besides, Lina might wake up and catch me at it._ “I just wish we could start heading home,” she said aloud. “It would all be better if we could just go home.”

 

***

It took Zelgadis two days of largely fruitless study at the Exchange to stop fuming and notice a clue he'd missed. He spoke up right then, at the dinner table. “Wehisho, I've been thinking about what you said the other day...”

“Yes?”

“Something doesn't quite add up. You left me with the impression that your medical training was all at the generalist level.”

“I know some very specific things about doctoring horses, but otherwise, yes.”

“But your answer to my question was actually pretty specific, and you said those cases were rare. So if you're a generalist, and your expert family members don't talk shop in front of you, how did you know?”

Wehisho's dark eyes grew darker as she met his gaze. “I think you can probably guess the answer to that, Zelgadis.”

Zel considered his own words for a moment or two, and then flushed. “I guess maybe I can,” he said at last, “Sorry.”

Wehisho shrugged. “I don't mind talking about it, really,” she said, “but this might not be the place for it.” She glanced around at the busy courtyard, full of groups of Rekwiti, with some of the more determined gossips glancing in their direction periodically, just in case the foreigners did something interesting again.

Lina looked up from her fourth bowl of succotash. “Why not?” She asked with a dangerous-looking grin, “None of us are squeamish, and if you're going to go pushing your long nose into other people's business uninvited, I think it's only fair for you to share yours.”

“It wasn't uninvited,” Zel protested, “I asked her to tell me how--” he broke off at Lina's glare. The redhead obviously had something else on her mind. What did I miss? Zel wondered.

“So,” Lina hissed, “go ahead, Wehisho. Tell us about-”

“Oh! I get it!” Gourry snapped his fingers and beamed at everyone around the table. “She knows about those complicated cases even though she's not a doctor because she was a patient!”

Zelgadis felt himself blush harder. _They don't know,_ he reminded himself. _They don't know which treatment Wehisho was describing...._

“That's right, Gourry,” Wehisho smiled at the grinning swordsman, “I was. I told Zelgadis about what might go into a bringing-in for someone whose souls were injured by trauma, and I learned about that when I was fifteen, after the Pig man raped me.”

This blunt end to the story landed with the force of a blow, despite the lightness of Wehisho's voice. Everyone around the table stared. Amelia squeaked and turned red. Lina gulped and turned green. Even Zel, who had been half expecting it, huffed out a surprised grunt. Gourry blinked rapidly. “A... a pig-man?”

“I don't think you've met any of the Pig people,” Wehisho said. “They're nomads and herders, and their territory is mostly North and West of here. They come down to the Valley in the rainy season when the acorns are ripe, and they stay on the Hunting Side of the towns for a while, and then move on. And they're mostly better behaved than that,” she added judiciously, “though they might do a little stealing if they have the chance. When Agate and everybody went to talk to them about what happened to me, it almost started a war, the Pig People were so insulted. But then one or two of the Pig girls said the man had been after them, too, and then they all behaved very properly. They made a ceremony to shame the man where the Pig girls and I rubbed dung in his hair, and his family made a gift of leather, and the whole group of them said they would stay away from Tachas Touchas for five years.”

“That's... good, I guess,” Amelia choked.

“Much better than being hurt by someone close to me,” Wehisho agreed blandly, looking at the back of Zel's head while he gazed at his plate. 

“Y-you seem to be all right, now, though,” Amelia pled, “Aren't you? Whatever your people did worked, didn't it?”

Wehisho wondered briefly if Amelia was asking for Zel's sake, or out of her own dislike of unhappy endings. The answer was the same in either case. “The Pig man was one of the hinges of my life,” she told them, “a place where everything turns. Now, nine or ten years later, I am in a place that I like. I do not know that it is the same place I would have come to had nothing happened.” She began ticking off reasons on her fingers: “I learned horse doctoring from a woman in Chulkumas. I went to Chulkumas in the first place because almost everyone in the Doctor's Lodge in Tachas Touchas at that time was one of my mothers or married to one of them, and I didn't want anyone that close singing the Carrion Gyre for me. When I was younger, I learned with the Doctors, and tried to channel my curiosity through the exchange and my restlessness through walks on the Mountain. But the horse doctoring meant I had a chance to work the Train line for a season, and doing so got me away from the Valley during acorn time. Taken together with all the whirlpooling I did in Chulkumas, joining the Finders pretty much ruined any chance I ever had of being my mother's favorite daughter – not that that was ever very likely. Agate is a planner, and my older sister Adsevin has always been more willing to follow those plans.”

The other four absorbed this in silence for a while. “Whirlpooling?” Gourry asked, finally.

“That's the local term for it,” Wehisho chuckled, “What it means is that I spent about a year reclaiming my right to my own body by fucking pretty much anyone who stood on two legs to pee.”

Everyone's faces went red. Amelia squeaked again, and Zelgadis cracked an abrupt laugh at the unexpected vulgarity. Wehisho shook her head, shooing the vision of her younger self away, and spooned yogurt on top of her own bowl of succotash. “Going forward from something like that can be very difficult, even with help,” she said. “But going backward is impossible, and trying to do so is dangerous.” She looked straight at Zelgadis.

 

***

The next day, Zelgadis asked Lina to help him with his research instead of treasure hunting, and Lina jumped into the task with frightening intensity. She tore through his collected notes and had the beginnings of a ritual sketched out by the end of the first day, though it was more hole than cloth.

“We should go to the Caldera God Monument up by Ikul to cast it,” she spouted, white gloves shuffling among her sketches and notes too rapidly to follow, “and time it for the full moon just before the Equinox, to emphasize the shift from protective strength to weakn- er- openness. And line the circle up by the magnetic poles, not the stars. Not that the difference is as big as it would be further north.... I wonder if we should bring in some milkweed or something, since that's the local symbol for purity, only of course the Chaos Words would be older, and the rest of the ritual is Kesh, not Rekwit, and besides we have no idea what the Sensh people say about purity...”

Wehisho, beside her, nodded miserably. She knew enough of Lina to have agreed, at last, to sharing the details she knew of the Carrion Gyre, whether they were hers to tell or not. The other option would have been to have Lina bring her trail of destruction into the Na Valley, in search of a qualified dwesh, and that would be worse. “Besides,” Xellos had observed in his oil-smooth voice,“It may be that a measure of transgression is appropriate to the ritual. You had your 'whirlpooling,' as you called it, Swallow-san, and those drugs. Both of them shared...violations, transformed by consent into a bond of trust. Like children cementing their friendship by sneaking candies. Very fitting.” The comparison made Zelgadis growl.

“Exactly!” Lina pounded the stack of notes with her fist. “Besides, it's not as if you stole what you remember.” At the Kesh woman's cautious nod, Lina went on, “and anyway, we're changing this around enough that our Carrion Gyre won't look much like yours at all, except for a few words here and there.”

Zelgadis, ignoring Lina's justifications, glowered. “You were never a child, Xellos, and what you know about real trust wouldn't fill a teaspoon.”

“Zelgadis-san wishes to remind you that I am not human,” Xellos translated. “I have tried to explain from time to time that, in fact, you make that particular mistake less often than he does, but he is not reassured.”

“I always think about you in the four-house mode,” Wehisho replied cryptically. “But that isn't the problem, is it? The real problem is not whether you are human, but whether, in this place and time, you mean harm, which I assume you do, and how far down this path we can travel and still avoid your intentions, about which we know nothing.”

“Further than you've gone,” Xellos answered with undiminished cheer, “But I'm certainly not going to say how much further.” The table where he had been leaning appeared to warp briefly, and he was gone.

Zelgadis growled again. This was how Xellos operated, over and over again. He knew exactly how to make it so that you had no choice but to go too far.

“What's the four-house mode?” Gourry asked, suddenly arriving with a tray of food: something like the local equivalent to sandwiches, or steam buns – a mix of soft dough, beans or meat, vegetables, and sometimes cheese, wrapped in cornhusks. 

“Kesh grammar,” Wehisho explained. “When talking about or to particular people that are here, now, definitely, who are living among human people and will die, we use the mode that belongs to the Five Houses of Earth. When talking about or to people who were, once, or might be, or who live in dreams or stories or theories, or who live in the wilderness, outside of humanity, that is the four-house mode. Coyote keeps one of the Four Houses of the Sky; the house of Wind and Wilderness, so of course she is a four-house person, as is anyone who lives in her household unless they come down into the Second House of the earth to be hunted, which Xellos has not. He is very much still in his own place, not ours, however talkative he is.”

“Oh....” Gourry nodded, wisely. “None of that made any sense to me at all. So you must be talking about magic.”

Wehisho laughed. “Perhaps it is, at that. Maybe all words are words of power to some degree.”

“And in that case,” Lina declared, reaching for a cornhusk sandwich, “There's no reason to hold back the words of the Carrion Gyre.”

 

***

Even with Wehisho's reluctant cooperation, identifying the important pieces of the Carrion Gyre was not a simple task. She knew a ceremony, taking some four days and including chants, songs, guided meditations, dance, straightforward medical practices for minor injuries, and, in her case, ritualized arguments with family members. Even within the “singing doctor's” part of the ceremony, which seemed to be among the least subject to improvisation, the words were buried and scattered. A three-word phrase might take ten minutes to sing, embedded in what Wehisho called a “matrix” of nonsense and variation, such as singing each syllable of a word with different vowels. Wehisho was very resistant to the idea of pulling those three words out of their matrix. From her point of view, the climax of the Carrion Gyre was a deliriously joyful passage of music (accompanied by a whirling dance) that embroidered the phrase “Wallewa Omba Oh,” and to pick it apart looking for translatable words was wrongheaded. “Nobody lives in a straight line,” she insisted, “Not even pine trees. And it is to be more alive that you want, isn't it, Zelgadis?” It got to where she threatened to teach them what she remembered of the Carrion Gyre syllable by syllable, and leave them to do their own translating.

“For what the Kesh were trying to do, you are correct,” Xellos announced, stepping in toward the end of one heated argument that had left Zelgadis doing his best to repair the table they had been working at before Lina's outburst, and Amelia huddled in tears. “Your people do not like power to gather in one place, Swallow-san. You like to keep it diffuse and moving from one place or person to another, or discharged harmlessly back into the Four Houses, or into the stones of the Earth. None of the rest of us use power in that fashion. We want the power in the Chaos Words focused, not divided. And if it makes us dangerous, it also means we can do things you can't.”

Wehisho muttered something about not thinking the things in question should be done at all, but she knew when she was beaten. Gourry, who had been hovering, shot her a sympathetic look before he drifted away again.


	2. Tipping point

Some great fate liked the idea of leaving for the Caldera God Monument a great deal more than it liked the idea of leaving for Seyruun. A boat was found to Ikul at the northernmost point of the Inland Sea, and another boat to take them through the marshes and up into the Volcano country. The weather was easy. Ingredients for the ritual potions showed up with unlikely rapidity. The ritual itself took shape with crystalline clarity, though of course, there would be no telling whether it did what they wanted it to do until they performed it.

Lina would be in charge of purging, of cleaving the golem and demon away from their their human host, without killing him or destroying his mind. She would be the primary spellcaster and speak the invocation, since the beings invoked were Dark entities, albeit not ones she had heard of before, except for Coyote, who seemed to be another name for Lord Beastmaster.

Amelia would be the healer, replacing the structures Lina purged as fast as they were cast off. Gourry would support her, because he was to provide the “map” of a human male at what Wehisho called the cellular level, in the places where Rezo's transformation had wiped out the original map. (This prospect made Zelgadis nervous. “I wouldn't mind ending up taller, or blonde, but I do _not_ want to end up with a brain that works like his.” “But that's where this cells business comes in,” Amelia had insisted, “The cells that remember aren't the ones that make your heart beat or your muscles work.”)

Gourry, when he'd had it explained to him three or four times, had agreed with his usual equanimity, saying only, “That would make Zel and me kind of blood brothers, wouldn't it?” 

The chimera had blinked at him, then smiled very slightly and shrugged. “If you like.”

Amelia herself was more nervous about Lina's part. The notion of Lord Beastmaster being invoked for what was essentially a purification seemed like a recipe for trouble.

“If it is any comfort to you, Amelia-san,” Xellos had said, wafting by while they were all in the midst of yet another argument, “I can assure you that even if the spell goes out of control this time, the world is not in danger.” He smirked. “You might be, of course, but not the whole world. Not exactly.” And then he'd vanished again.

Wehisho had a role, too, in support of Zelgadis. Zel would have the unenviable job of consenting, holding himself open to another transformation he did not control, allowing himself to truly trust his friends to get everything right, when trust had gone so badly for him before, all while guarding his own mind and memories. “In other words,” Wehisho told him with grim cheer, “You have to heal your souls while Amelia-bin attends to your body, and Lina brings in the four-house people.” Exactly how Wehisho was to help with this process was a bit obscure – she would be drumming and singing some of the cast-off matrix chant – but Zelgadis insisted he understood it, and wanted her there, and Wehisho had agreed with far more enthusiasm than she had given to any other part of the process.

 

****

The trip to the Caldera God Monument was arduous. They left their campsite at dawn, leaving Wehisho's mule picketed by a brown trickle of a stream, wide in its basalt bed, but barely deeper than a puddle; notable less for itself than for the aching green splash of the surrounding vegetation against the black pine trees, silver sage, yellow cheat grass, and ashy gray dirt that made up most of the landscape. Their bedrolls and other gear were set in the gray part, not the green, at Wehisho's recommendation. Scorpions were easier to guard against than mosquitoes, and dry dirt preferable to wet clay, however soft the grass that grew on top of it.

The monument poked up from the horizon, a red mound in the distance with no set path to it. The local religion cast the volcano deities in the role of defeated and imprisoned monsters and focused instead on the sun, the moon, and the bean plants. In fact, the maps from the City of Mind showed nothing like a caldera anywhere within a hundred miles of the Caldera God Monument. It had been built some centuries ago by refugees from another, even more actively volcanic region that was now under water. All the same, the place was respected, and to some degree maintained. Its mute, sullen power was obvious even from afar.

The last two hours of the journey, they crunched across a seemingly endless plain of red lava pebbles, sharp and skittering underfoot, deep as sand on a beach. The Monument itself was made of larger chunks of the stuff, cemented together to form a misshapen, hollow tower like a cinder cone, some sixty feet tall. It loomed ahead of them, seeming much closer than it was, adding weight to the silence around them. When everyone stopped walking, there was nothing to be heard but a rush of air; not even insects found anything worth their time in the lava fields. Lina gulped audibly, then set her shoulders and led on around the base of the Monument to the open side, where the tower became an open dome and a great slab of basalt rose above the lava pebbles as a stage. This was to be their Working ground. 

“All right!” Lina announced, “We gotta hurry if we want to time this for when the moon's at the nadir point. Zel, you anchor the chalk lines and work on the central diagrams. Amelia, you start scribing the outer rim of the circle and I'll come in behind you with the iron filings. Gourry... just stay out of the way for now, OK?” Gourry looked around in vain for a comfortable place to sit, and finally chose one of the rough steps that led to the basalt stage. 

Wehisho hesitated, then asked Lina, “Will it hurt anything if I start drumming now?” At the sorceress' headshake, she took out the instrument she had purchased in Choum Rekwit and began to pace around the edge of the stage, beating a slow, simple pattern of lower and higher notes and listening to the way the walls bounced the sound, before finally choosing a spot to hunker back on her heels and play something more complicated. The drum, being small, had a sharp, slightly anxious sound to it. As Wehisho adjusted her touch, it grew softer without releasing its tension, until the pattern of the drumming seemed to fit – no so much the looming Monument as the long walk to it; the murmuring of newborn pebbles that had only recently stopped moving, still rough, itchy, and unsoftened by water. Amelia, concentrating mostly on trying to set up for a healing spell in such a hostile place, listened and thought she was beginning to understand why Zelgadis had wanted the Kesh woman involved, even if she didn't have magic.

Gradually, the diagrams took form, and the rest of the participants settled into their appointed places. 

Amelia came first. Her spell was based in part on the Resurrection chant; the tricky thing would be remembering the differences, and keeping her chant timed to stay in counterpoint with Lina's and Zel's. And allowing her own feelings to help her without letting them get in the way. The process of healing on what Wehisho-san called the 'cellular level' was a strangely intimate matter – even more so, in its way, than the one night she and Zel had had together. Even more difficult, if she allowed herself to think about it, which she was trying not to, was that it would require the same deep touch with Gourry, who knelt beside her. _This will change all of us._

Kneeling in the sunlight, Amelia began her invocation:

Great Mother Earth  
In your boundless  
Compassion, please:  
Let what is lost  
Grow whole again.

Let Love's touch shape  
This changing form  
to match itself.  
Let this body  
Return anew  
To itself now,

Let it re-grow  
Lead us down to the river singing.

 

Standing in the shade of the monument, Lina shivered in excitement and began her invocation:

This anger is stale;  
This fear is rotten.  
Coyote bring your wind  
Take them from us!

All you who live in  
The other direction  
Come eat your fill now  
Turn us all homeward

We have gone too far  
Along this same road  
Let us turn, turning  
As the world still turns

Rain, come break the stone open!  
We trust you, Bear;  
Take us down to the river singing

Standing at the balance point, half his face hidden in the shade of the monument, Zelgadis held himself ready, trying to let the currents of magic flow through him and keep his footing, both in the world and the Astral plane. For once, he had to keep from holding himself aloof. He had to open himself even beyond trust. Listening to Wehisho's drum and chant helped; Zel usually avoided music as he avoided other forms of emotionalism, but now it was the road he walked. _We are with you,_ Wehisho was singing, her voice plain and thin, but true to its pitch. _We are beside you._

Wehisho was beside him, in her profound otherness and her startling similarities. Wehisho who had walked the Carrion Gyre and healed herself, and told him, this is what healing looks like: like going on, not going backward. But Wehisho had not healed herself without help. 

Lina was with them, and with her the boundless hope she carried, that not even the Lord of Nightmares had been able to crush. Of all the enemies Rezo had managed to make, how had Zel known to attach himself to Lina? _Why run after a stolen piece of your soul? Just make a new one._

Gourry was with them, faithful Gourry, who had offered Zel brotherhood with the same casualness he had pledged himself as Lina's protector, and for the same reason. _He saw I needed one._ Overlooked and berated, often as not, Gourry went on being, simply and without fuss, a good man. Barring the memory issues, Zelgadis could do a lot worse than end up like Gourry. _He really is what I thought you were, Rezo. And the proof is that he's almost nothing like you._

Amelia was with them. Brave, generous Amelia. When Zelgadis had been certain he was heartless, Amelia had given him hers. "When you can feel again, you will feel pain," Wehisho had warned him, months ago. "You have to know that it will be bearable, and it will be worth it." Amelia knew that, bone-deep. And she chose love, every time. _I love you too, Mei._

Something inside broke. He wept for the pain of air on his wounds, the pain of muscles that had not moved in too long. He wept in relief at the weight he no longer had to carry, as he began his part of the chant:

In Fog Puma's house,  
In the House of Dreams  
Nothing is  
Anything might be.

I am changing  
In Puma's house  
I am formless,  
Let me be shaped anew.

May I walk lightly,  
As the fog goes,  
Holding everything,  
Moved by everything,

May the world hold me;  
Carry me down to the river singing.

As the spell began to penetrate, the different currents of influence mixed. He could feel Gourry's love and generosity, Amelia's hope, Lina's unacknowledged loyalty. _It's all so beautiful._ All the same, Zel was the first to realize that something had gone wrong.

 

***

Lina scowled, still chanting. The spell was trying to escape her. _Where is all this extra power coming from?_ It wasn't more than Lina could handle- not yet. But it would be soon if she couldn't figure it out. Amelia's magic was still flowing in a steady, thin stream, exactly right for delicate work like this. Lina had shaped her part of the spell to do the same, but the pressure was all wrong.

“Imagine a lake,” Xellos' voice sounded conversationally in her ear. He wasn't visible at the moment, and what the hell was he doing here, anyway? The voice flitted to somewhere behind her left shoulder. “Imagine a dam at one end, that controls the flow of water from the lake, and a sluice gate that keeps the power- excuse me- the water - at a certain level.” Now he was somewhere over her head. _Dammit, this shouldn't concern him._ “When it's the right time- 'That-Time-of-the-Month', the gate opens and the extra water drains away... But it hasn't been, has it, Lina? Not for, what- eight weeks now? Ten? So the water just keeps rising, and now, when you try to open that gate, the pressure's just too high; it could burst the dam altogether.”

 _Stay out of my head, Xellos._ She steadied her concentration again; if she could wield the Ragna blade, she could do this. The next step was to shift her awareness up to the Astral plane, where the three mages could shape the magic in concert with each other... She opened her inner eyes, and there was Xellos- playing with the dancing lines of power like a cat. And behind him were a whole horde of other mazoku- surely they couldn't be anything else? In the front ranks she saw a puffy white thing with a tiny black head, and next to it a cadaverous man in a black cloak, with a long nose, a bald, wrinkled head, and arms twice as long as his body. Another one with wild hair sticking straight out and a black mask across the eyes... dozens of crow-creatures. And that purple-headed bastard in front of them all, of course. 

“You can't be here!” Lina screamed at them all. “I set the wards myself. I know you can't be here. And you can't touch us.” Back to the task at hand... 

“Well, Lina, that's where you're wrong.” Xellos floated into the pattern they were weaving and touched it with one finger. It jumped to his hand immediately and he set himself into the circle of mages. Purple lines of power joined the white, blue and orange ones. “How closely were you listening to Swallow-san? This spell you've put together is based on the Carrion Gyre of the Kesh, and the Kesh, well, they don't _revere_ us exactly, that would be the Dayao, but neither do they strive to keep us out. Especially if they they want a bit of cleaning done... We're here by _invitation,_ Lina! 'All you who live in the other direction.' We're welcome to draw on any source of power you've put in the net, and shape it, just as you are.”

 _You...bastard..._ The other mazoku were taking their own places within the wheel of power- every one that joined the spell was augmenting it, and every time Lina or Amelia tried to use some of their own power to wrench the thing back into shape, that power too, was sucked into the pattern and circled back through all of them, getting stronger, and stronger... _this could get big as the Giga Slave- it's going to burn through..._ Lina felt even her terror ripped away from her: the mazoku were converting it into more raw power, and feeding that back into the cycle. _When did I forget that Xellos was a danger? Stupid. Oh, guys, I'm so sorry...._

 _They can't hold the power,_ Gourry realized suddenly. He couldn't have said how he knew, but this wasn't his first apocalypse. _It's going to burn right through them and me and the whole mountain too...maybe further... Oh, well. It's been a hell of a ride._

Zelgadis was cold with horror, under the searing heat of the spell as it spread itself along his skin, the lines of power turning purple and swollen with the addition of the mazoku. _It's burning through- we can't hold it. And it's going to take all of us, not just me... what kind of monster was I, to think this was a risk worth taking?_ Zelgadis could feel the mazoku rip his shame and despair away, turning them into more raw power that they fed back into the spell. The wheel was turning, faster and faster... _I'm so sorry..._

Every time the wheel turned, Amelia felt the pull, like a tide. _We can't hold it- it's burning through... Zel!_

It had been so very long since he'd not needed to hold back; centuries of sneaking and spying, during the Kouma Wars and since. Not that Xellos hadn't enjoyed himself; he'd been made for spying, after all – but even a born spy could sometimes covet a warrior's purity; the chance to spend himself in a blaze of glory... _This is worthy,_ She had said, and it was. He and the lesser mazoku he commanded would yield all pretense of individual power or impetus, but they would touch the very core of the world; when they ceased to be, they would be everywhere. And She had promised to remember him. He danced among the dancing lines of power, seeing how they wound, tighter and tighter, seeing how they would snap and pull the world after them. Not an explosion, like the Giga Slave, but an arrow that would pierce the heart of the earth. He laughed, or maybe it was one of the others; such distinctions mattered less and less. The Inverse and the other children were wholly absorbed in their sweet horror as their spell went awry and started spinning... they clung to wispy pieces of themselves as if it mattered. Xellos no longer needed to cling to anything... it was all so, so easy. 

The chanting in the circle had changed to cries of fear. Wehisho stopped drumming abruptly and stared at her four companions, half hidden now behind curving lines of purple light that turned faster and faster. _Those twisted-neck idiots, they closed the circle!_ Inside her head, she heard children's voices, singing: 

_Circle around around the house_  
_circle around and back_  
_everything burning burning burning_  
_everything burning black_

The song was called “Making the Gyre,” and the dance that went with it might well be the oldest dance in the Na Valley. It was first one children learned at the heyimas, if they didn't learn it from other children, first. _We make sure children learn the important things early._ The purple light was full of Sky people; she had never seen them so clearly before. There was Maggot, there was Condor, and over there, Raccoon. And directly across the circle, there was Coyote's Son, bright with power, his eyes all the way open for once and his hair standing away from his head like a dog's hackles. Wehisho set down her drum and stood up, walking into the circle of earth and sky people in front of her, and sang along with the memory of her younger self: 

_O who will break the circle?_  
_O who will loose my hand?  
_O who will be-_ _

__

Coyote's Son pulled his hand away from the wheel of power and swung inward, toward her. Wehisho reached out- 

__

_There, across the ground from where Xellos danced himself away, Swallow of the Serpentine watched, reaching her hands out. “Who will break the circle?” she called, reaching out, from the earth into the sky. From the sky to the earth, Xellos reached out to cross the bridge she made, pulling the great, whirling spell behind him. Their hands met. He let go. The spring unwound..._

__

His hand closed on her right hand; they swung in a half-turn. But then, instead of handing her to the next person down the line, Xellos was moving through her somehow- the hand moved up along the bones of her arms, and for the briefest of instants, she was filled with a wild, delighted otherness. Time disappeared, leaving only stillness, silence, and the world turning... and then the moment was gone. He let loose of her left hand and spun on, the winds following in his wake, gyring down the path he had made. Wehisho felt herself vanish, scattering like dust into those winds. They spun and spun around a center, but now the center was moving, and the wheel of fire had become a gyre, a burning river full of spiraling eddies washing across the world. Turning, returning, someone somewhere sang. The stretched lines of power broke and snapped backward, reversing themselves like waves retreating from the shore. Stones tumbled away down a gorge. Some seedlings were uprooted; some merely flattened themselves in the current and clung. The arms of the spiral moved outward, faster and faster, but weaker the further and faster they went, until the dance returned again to stillness, silence. Light and sound were replaced by the smell of the hills in summer: burning, lightning-struck sage and the brief, fierce rains. 

__

__

*** 

__

_em >This is getting way too familiar._ There was always the moment after the world didn't end, where they found themselves kneeling or staggering up in a smoking landscape, gradually taking stock of each other. There were always pressing questions, like who? and why? How? And the questions competed with the need to get back to camp before sunset, and maybe make some kind of meal... Lina sighed, and lifted her head. This smoking landscape wasn't as bad as some she'd seen, possibly because the lava fields had already been so barren. Zel was still kneeling at his place, and Lina could still make out the blue points of his ears, sticking out from under his hair. _Poor guy. All that and it didn't even work._ “Is everyone OK?” she asked. 

There were affirmative mutters to either side of her. “Weirdest spell I've ever been a part of.” Zelgadis declared. “One minute the world's about to end and the next one I'm just dealing with a skinned...knee...” his voice dropped away. 

“Zel?” 

“I'm... bleeding! I scraped my knee, and I'm bleeding!” He laughed, suddenly. 

“Seriously?” The others ran toward him. Amelia was first in line- even if she was still too tired to cast a healing spell. 

“The stones fell away,” Wehisho agreed. She looked very ordinary, her clothes dusty and her posture tired, the drum sitting upside-down on the rock floor next to her, except that her hair was an even frizzier cloud than usual under her battered straw hat, and her face was slashed in two by a white scar. It curved up her neck and jaw, becoming a spiral on her right cheek, and opened out again into a line across her nose and forehead. Wehisho did not seem to be aware of it at all. She was explaining: “They landed over there.” She pointed at a scatter of purple-blue rocks, glaringly out of place on the black basalt. “We should make a heya cairn with them, perhaps.” 

“So...” Lina knelt down and fingered the pebbles doubtfully. “The spell worked on the golem part, but not the demon?” She looked up at them all and made a fist. “That makes no sense! Why would it-” 

“You know what, Lina? I don't even care.” Zelgadis rubbed his scraped knee, laughing. “I don't! It's... this is... enough.” He turned toward Amelia, and reached up to cup one blue hand over her cheek. “It's fine.” 

Lina blinked for a moment, and then sprang to her feet, declaring, “Good! Because I am NEVER going through something like that again. You wanna get rid of those pointy ears, Zel, I'll take my sword to 'em. No more half-thought-out experimental magic for me! _EVER!”_

“Promises, promises,” Gourry muttered. 

“What's that supposed to mean?” 

“Never mind. Let's see if we managed to avoid burning up our camp this time, okay?” 

“Zelgadis? Lina-san?” 

“What is it, kiddo?" 

“How did we survive this time? I was sure we were losing control, and everything went white, and...” 

“No idea.” 

“We opened the Gyre,” Wehisho said. “Xellos was strong enough to break out of the wheel, and I met him in the center.” 

“You? You don't have any power!” 

“Think of... a ravine- or a canyon.” The voice coming from the base of the monument was thready. “Empty and dry for years, and then a flash flood. Swallow-san had... the pattern...” 

“O who will break the circle? O who will loose my hand?...” Wehisho sang softly, and stopped. The next line was “who will be my lover.” But love and lovers belonged in the Five Houses of earth, and the moment after Xellos took her hand belonged in Hawk's house – the still air of eternity. And the moment after that lived with Coyote in the wind, where nothing lasted at all. 

“Waitaminute...” Lina cogitated. “Are you gonna tell me _Xellos_ helped save the day? Again? Acting against the other mazoku this time and not some outside force?” 

Wehisho shook her head. “Of course not. The world was destroyed, as it is nine times every heartbeat. This is the new one.” 

_“What?”_

“Wehisho!” the huddle at the base of the monument sat up and protested, “That was a _secret!”_ Then he slumped down again. “Oooh, my head! I don't know why I'm still even here... ow... ow...” 

The Kesh woman was unimpressed. “It still is, because they don't believe me. But even so, we are here, now, where a stone man is less stony, and some of the poisoned places have changed, and compasses point south... Did you leave a piece of yourself behind you, Xellos, that I know all these things now?” 

“Of course not! All I did was deepen the channel. Ow..” 

Lina rolled her eyes. “Whatever. We're all alive, we're all hungry, let's get moving.” 

The others started down the steps and drifted in the direction of camp, slowly. Lina came up to Wehisho, who was still standing by the little pile of blue stones. “Hey- Wehisho? I've got a question for you.” 

“Indeed?” 

“You said you can tell... things. Can you tell- did what just happened- I mean-” Lina's voice dropped to just above a whisper. “Is the baby all right?” 

Gourry's head snapped around, and he scrambled back up the stairs. “Lina, what baby?” 

Wehisho let her eyes drift half-closed, her forehead wrinkled in concentration. The scar on her cheek seemed to glow for a moment in the shade of her hat, then subsided into dull white. Wehisho looked up again. “She's fine, Lina. She'll grow up to be very tall and strong, and she won't have magic of her own, but when power comes into her hands she'll wield it, and let it go again...” 

Lina, still soft-voiced, said, “Like her fath-” 

“What baby, Lina?” Gourry was right next to them now. 

Lina turned and looked up at him, and then, abruptly, collapsed against him, pressing her forehead against his chest. “I-I'm sorry, Gourry,” she whispered, “I should have told you. Only... I wasn't sure... and... I was scared.” 

“Lina...” He looked down at her and set one big, gentle hand on her back, under her hair. 

Wehisho could feel their love and blossoming hope like little suns, shining there beside her, and another pair of little suns further away, where Zelgadis and Amelia walked hand in hand. The warmth loosened tight places inside her, it was comforting. _But too much more of it and I think I would burn, like in the story of the Frog in Toad's house._ She turned to the one place on the blazing hot lava fields that was still shaded: the corner of the stairs down, where a well of pain seeped. _“Only deepened the channel”, you said. Which one of us were you lying to? Or have you not realized yet just what got washed downstream in that flood of yours?_ “Come on, _binyez,”_ she said to Xellos, in Kesh, “Let's get you a little further away from the fires.” 

Her use of the Five House mode didn't register with him. But neither did he reach, as he would have done once, for his staff. _Just as well_ , Wehisho thought, _it's broken anyway._ He worked his way slowly up, steadying himself with a hand on her shoulder. “Yes,” he said, “thank you. And maybe somewhere quieter. Where's that _appalling_ thumping noise coming from? That wasn't here before...” 

Wehisho took a deep, steadying breath and braced herself for another flood. “I think that's your heartbeat, Xellos.” 

*** 

The shriek brought the others running back toward the monument once again: “My _WHAAAT??”_

Lina skidded to a stop a few yards away, trying to summon up the energy for a Flare Arrow that wouldn't look like one of Sylphiel's. Zel and Amelia flanked her. 

And then they all just stopped. “Is he-” 

_“-crying?”_

Wehisho knelt beside him and held him as he wept, thinking. _All the way around... all the way through._ This man had followed Coyote. Followed her all the way through chaos into creation, followed his loyalty through to exile... her heart ached with pity for him, while her head ran onward. _Wakwaha-na. I was thinking I wanted to talk about what happened with the visionaries anyway; I bet they'd love to learn with him, if he wanted to come West. And I think the Blue Clay House might adopt him, if he can unlearn his habits of cruelty now that his body uses other food. Or Obsidian – wouldn't the White Clowns just suit him right down to the ground...but he'll probably go East with the others; that would be simpler, after all._

__

__

__

His sorrow and rage were rising in her, heavy and cool. Somewhere inside herself, thirsty roots were taking in that water. The pupfish eggs were hatching, the toads coming out of their crevices. Someday soon, or maybe a long time from now, it would go gyring out again across the world, and she would tell it where. Wehisho closed her eyes. With her face turned away from the bright lovers, she smiled. 

__

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really wish I could find the first version of the Carrion Gyre chant I wrote down [ahem-mumble-something] years ago, because I remember it being much niftier than what I ended up with here. Oh, well. That version of the story involved neutral superbeings called the Old Earth Snakes, among other things, and maybe the chant sucked as badly as the plot. But now i'll never know for sure...


	3. Reverberations

_The world is remade nine times every heartbeat..._ It had changed under their feet, and their minds stuttered and jerked, trying to catch up. Zelgadis rubbed his chin, fingers brushing against the purple spots that had, an hour ago, been purple-gray stones. Lina rubbed her belly, which didn't feel any different, except that now, she knew... and so did Gourry. Amelia knelt in the dust and picked up the upper half of Xellos' broken staff, running her fingers along the jagged crack that bisected the dulled stone at the top of it, and Wehisho tended to the man himself – truly a man, now, for reasons that none of them understood, including, it seemed, him. The whole world was changed; the future suddenly pulled into a new, unguessable course.

 

***

It wasn't supposed to happen like this. He was supposed to have died, to have spent his essence into that last great spell until nothing was left. He'd been ready. Instead, he had... a headache. And a heartbeat. And salt water streaming from his eyes and nose. And running through it all, the dreadful, certain knowledge that he was cast out of the Sea of Chaos for eternity.

There were hands on his shoulder, shaking him gently. Swallow of the Serpentine was calling him by name. He had schemed and manipulated to have her here, to use her as the vessel for reshaping the Carrion Gyre. He had hijacked Zelgadis' cure as he had meant to, filled it with power until it became something entirely other, forced the whole world into a new shape of his choosing, cleansed of an inimical power and opening the lands outside the Barrier for mazoku intervention. It had all worked just as planned, except he was still here, trapped in his physical form, and Swallow was calling him by name, speaking Kesh, which somehow he still understood. “Here, now, Xellos. _Dahudaz Imhai_ \- Walk here, now. I know you are bereft, but you must choose now. Are you coming back to the camp with us? Or do you wish to stay here and die? I have opiates with me, if you want. I would stay tonight and sing you west. If what you want is to die.”

Purple eyes met dark brown ones, a will glinting behind them again. “ _Yes_ ,” Xellos hissed, “I was supposed to die,” and then he jerked, and drew in a breath that wasn't quite a sob. His eyes fell again. “No. No, no point to it. Death wouldn't free me now. I'd just get reborn somewhere else – fucking Gaav all over again. I'll walk.” He pushed himself upright off Swallow's shoulders. 

 

***  
“I'll walk,” Xellos grated, pushing himself up off Wehisho's shoulders and squaring his own determinedly. 

“Here.” Wehisho plucked off her hat and set it on his head. “And take off your cloak. Don't give yourself heatstroke.”

“What was that about?” Lina demanded.

“His power is gone,” Swallow explained. “He has come to the Five Houses as a human, and I don't think he meant to do that.”

“You mean...” Zelgadis couldn't quite bring himself to finish such a melodramatic sentence.

“He started crying when I told him he had a heartbeat.”

They all stared at Xellos, and then away again. What was there to say?

The world was changed, but there was nothing to be done but small things. Walk back to camp. Eat. Refill canteens. Every action blurred under the torrent of thoughts and feelings that filled mind and soul, leaving the ordinary things to seem unreal. 

“OK!” Lina finally announced, “Let's go! I'm starved.” She shook Gourry's hand off and strode forward.

“Lina!” Gourry grabbed her shoulder again. “Camp is this way!”

“What? No way.”

“Is too,” Gourry insisted, “See? There's the stripey rocks on the horizon, and there's the monument, and all our shadows are pointing east, so camp is this way.”

“But...” Lina shook her head, trying to clear it. Gourry was right. “Never mind. I just got turned around somehow.”

“Not just you,” Zelgadis trotted up to them, Amelia at his heels. “Look at this.” His compass sat in his open palm. Zelgadis rotated it carefully, orienting it by the late afternoon sun. “That business about 'all the compasses pointing south' wasn't just a metaphor.”

“What?” They all bent over the little gold circle, looking at the delicate red arrow pointing in the wrong direction. 

Xellos' exhausted voice floated out from under Wehisho's hat. “At least that part worked.” Everyone turned and looked at him, but he volunteered nothing more.

Amelia, trying to consider the reasons for such a bizarre spell, gasped. “Oh no! All those poor sailors and- and...”

“The sailors will still have the stars to steer by,” Zelgadis comforted her. “And the needle still seems to run straight, if in the opposite direction. I don't think you need to worry for that. But I wonder if this business of the poles switching... What's that going to do to the astral plane? I mean, the cardinal points are still the cardinal points, but...”

“We'll have to experiment,” Lina said firmly. “Later. After a good meal and some sleep.” 

“I thought you said 'no more magical experiments,' ” Gourry protested unwisely, and Lina delivered a halfhearted thump to his shoulder. Everyone took sightings off the monument and the rocks, and started the shuffle back toward camp.

 

***

Camp, when they found it, was right where it was supposed to be, and so was Fefinum, though the mule had managed to pull her picket stake out of the ground and wander downstream, in search of more succulent forage. Everyone but Xellos, who was still largely inert matter, bolted cold succotash and refilled canteens, then rinsed each other off further downstream. Gourry, at Lina's glare, turned his back on the three young women. Zelgadis stumped a hundred yards away from the rest of them, around and behind some shrubbery, the better to look himself over in private. 

He itched, externally and internally. All his clothes tickled. The first giddy burst of joy at being able to really feel things again, of being free, at long last, of the lingering threat of coercion from the golem, had settled down into questions that were probably unanswerable and certainly not answerable in the next ten minutes. _Why was the golem purged, but not the demon? And does that mean I'm two-thirds human, now? Or half and half? Or, worse, two-thirds demon? And, oh, Gods, I'm going to have to learn how to fight all over again aren't, I? And I look just as strange as ever..._ but he felt no desire within himself to go seeking a cure for his cure. _I've had to adjust to getting what I thought I wanted before. This time, at least, I'm truly among friends._

When Amelia mentioned the scar, Wehisho ran her finger in a seam she found along her right cheek, and her finger traced the double spiral of the heyiya-if. That was, in the Valley, a symbol of holiness; the pattern of the pattern of the world. Oddly comforting, to know that the changes she had undergone had a place in the world she knew. _I will take it as a sign,_ she decided, _that the power that has come to me does not need to turn my head and make me into a warrior like Lina and the others._ She washed her face, hands, and neck, and decided to leave more thorough ablutions for another time.

While the others splashed in the shallow creek, she set about adapting the camp for the presence of one more person, an ill-equipped one with no canteen, only a cloak to guard against the nighttime chill, and an unknown set of physical reflexes. Perhaps one of the other men could lend a spare tunic as an extra layer – hers wouldn't fit him – and she could put him between herself and Fefinum. Experimentally, she stretched out a hand toward the place next to her own spot of ground and opened a narrow gate inside herself. A tiny whirlwind whisked itself across the space, rendering a spot just large enough for a new bedroll clear of rocks, debris, and, lurking creepy-crawlies . The little wind even created a small hollow in the place where his hips would land. Wehisho's hand felt warm and slightly tingly, then cooler again as the power she had used replaced itself from the mourner nearby. _The world is remade nine times every heartbeat..._

The other four made their ways back up from the creekbed just as Xellos was refusing Wehisho's offer of a sleeping agent. Or extra socks. He was exhausted; the usual consequences of involving himself in a major magical work were compounded by the dizzying bombardment of new sensations from the physical world, all of them of an intensity he had never before experienced. As soon as he could, he flopped himself disconsolately down into the little clearing Weshisho had made and pulled the capelet of his cloak over his head, shutting out the world in gesture, if not in fact. 

 

***

Conversation around the little firepit turned, unsurprisingly, to the question of how and why their spell had behaved so very oddly. Lina spoke slowly, contemplatively, in marked contrast to the manic tumult that had marked her presence for the last few weeks; she had stopped tying not to think about her future. “Well, if you listen to the chant, really the Carrion Gyre says a lot more that could apply to the golem than to the demon... Brau demons are weather workers, right? And the only times we mention weather in the spell chant it's on the good guys' side.” 

“So you're thinking if we'd added more from some kind of exorcism...” Zelgadis brushed his hair out of his eyes again. “Except I've gone that route before and it never worked.” He sighed. “But really, if even this much was enough to reverse the magnetic poles of the earth, I'm not eager to try again anytime soon.”

“But that was because Xellos-san hijacked the spell, Zelgadis-san! We can't assume something like that would happen every time!”

“We have to assume it could. Just like Lina has to assume she could end the world any time she casts the Giga Slave. In the end, this is my body and my responsibility, and I say it's time to stop.” He smiled slightly in the firelight, pointed teeth gleaming. “This isn't a defeat, Amelia. I made my peace with Rezo back in Taforashia, and now I've finally made peace with myself, too.”

Amelia clasped her hand under her chin, eyes sparkling in the firelight. “Oh, Zelgadis-san, I'm so glad!” She prang up to sweep him into a hug, as if she were a little kid again. For once, Zelgadis did not push her away.

“Besides,” he said, “It finally occurred to me that if what really bothers me is the way other people react, maybe I shouldn't be arranging my life so that just about everyone I meet is seeing me for the first time. Maybe I need to find a home base somewhere.”

“Like Seyruun, maybe?”

His smile faded and he looked away from her. “Maybe... Or maybe back to Camezind, or to New Sairaag, depending on... well, that's a decision for later.”

Amelia wisely chose not to press him further and instead changed the subject. “Of course, even stranger than what the spell didn't do is what it did.”

“Yeah....”

Wehisho made her way over to the fire, having piled the ex-mazoku with as many blanket-like objects as she could scrounge on short notice and leaving him looking like a pile of laundry. “I'm sure I must be very simple-minded about these things,” she began, “but the intent of the spell was to turn a monster into a human, was it not? And then Coyote's Son inserted himself, and all of a sudden Zelgadis was no longer the most monstrous thing in the circle.”

Zelgadis sat bolt upright. “You mean if that purple-headed weasel hadn't stuck his oar in, the cure might have been complete?” He sprang to his feet and began stalking toward the laundry pile. “I could just...” he trailed off, and then turned back and sat by the fire again. “I actually can't think of anything I could plausibly do to him that he would hate more than what actually happened.” And the chimera subsided.

“Except,” Lina added, “I'm not sure we would have had enough power without him...” She poked savagely at the fire with a long twig. “I wanna go home. This place is all crazy and mixed up.”

Wehisho went back to puttering and humming. Amelia brooded silently, mostly considering Zel. Why, after all this time and everything they'd shared, wasn't he willing to commit to Seyruun? Or to her? He loved her. She knew he did... didn't he? There was the way he looked at her sometimes; she remembered his voice whispering, _Mei,_ the one night they'd had together... but then he'd pulled back again, and now he said, “Maybe Camezind...”

“Oy, Lina?”

“What is it, Gourry?” Lina prepared herself to try and explain Astral magic in a way that a jellyfish might understand. Except that he probably wouldn't.

“Do you wanna get married?”

“What?”

Gourry's face grew bright red under his yellow hair. “Well, I mean, there's our baby coming...” his words picked up speed, “And, um, I love you, and... but if you don't wanna keep the baby I'd... I wouldn't make you- only, only before it sounded like you were thinking of keeping the baby and...” the end of the speech was lost in a babble of growing speed and diminishing volume. 

“ _Baby?_ ” There weren't many words that could have reached Amelia through her fog of doubts and exhaustion right then, but that was certainly one of them. “Lina-san, are you really – oooooh!” 

Lina, an even brighter red than Gourry, fended off Amelia's congratulatory hug. “Hey! Back off! Let – let me think.”

“But you—eeee!” Amelia squealed in delight. _See, Zel?_ she thought, _Love always finds a way!_

“Yeah...” Lina's voice was completely devoid of its usual brassy edge, making her sound much younger. “I guess so. I... I wasn't sure, but Xellos said that was where some of the extra power in the Carrion Gyre was coming from. He _gloated_ about it, the pervert.” Lina shied a rock at the laundry pile, which did not even stir in response. “And then, afterward, Wehisho...” Lina's voice went even softer. “It's gonna be a girl.”

Amelia clasped her hands and bounced on her heels. “But Lina-san! That's wonderful!”

Lina shrugged. “I guess.... bandit-hunting was starting to get kind of old, anyhow. Maybe- maybe it is time to settle down.”

“Not unless you want to,” Gourry insisted sternly. “I'm not the kind of guy to go forcing you into anything if you're not ready.” Zel quirked an eyebrow at him and he turned red again.

“Gourry,” Lina began in that same, soft, voice, and then shook herself, sprang up, and clapped him on the shoulder in her more usual fashion. “Yeah, let's go ahead and get married. If we do it out here then Amelia can't go overboard planning ribbons and silverware and all that stupid stuff.”

“I thought you liked that kind of thing,” Gourry said, surprised.

“Well, I kinda do, but... never mind.”

“Oh, but surely the local traditions must be beautiful too!” Amelia could see it now. Something with circles of glowing torches (very appropriate for Lina-san, anyway) and garlands of flowers... “Wehisho-san? Who performs marriage ceremonies around here? Is it a priest?”

Their guide stopped humming and looked up, then made her way back into the firelight once more. “Around here?” she said, “Nobody. The people in the Volcano Country don't marry.”

“But... but everyone has marriages, don't they?”

Wehisho shook her head emphatically, setting her curls bouncing. “No. Everyone has families. Around here, men and women work together, but their households are separate – women live with their mothers and sisters, and men live with their uncles and brothers. And a woman who has more than one child by the same man is a scandal; I think it has something to do with how isolated they are, and needing to prevent inbreeding.”

Lina and Amelia both gawped at her, and Zelgadis snorted amusement. “I admit,” he said, “that's one I haven't heard before. Is it a common... arrangement, on the peninsula?”

Wehisho shrugged. “Just in the poorer places where the dirt doesn't want to grow food crops. We marry, in the Valley, and so do the Amaranth People, and the Dayao.”

“And what do Valley weddings look like?” Amelia was planning again. 

“The Wedding Night is the second night of the World wakwa, at the time of the Spring equinox. Everyone getting married dances, and the rest of us sing for them.”

“You can only get married once a _year?_ ” Amelia wailed. “That's awful!”

Wehisho tilted her head. “Why awful?” she asked, “It's not like not being married stops people from doing anything.”

Lina blushed even harder, and Zelgadis hid his face in his hands. Amelia's lip quivered. “But,” she protested, “If you're really in love, and you want to be together, and start a household, and... if- if there's a baby coming...”

“No reason you have to get married before any of that, is there?” Wehisho wrinkled her forehead in thought and ran her finger along her new scar. “I'm told the Dayao manage it differently, but in the Valley, the wedding is what you do to recognize that a marriage has grown between two people. Marriages grow rather slowly, and they can get uprooted easily at first, so it doesn't make sense to have the wedding at the beginning. You have to come inland – that is, stop being celibate – and you work together, and maybe there are promises, and then you keep those for a while, and eventually, there's the World wakwa. The first night is the Mourning Night, where we remember and praise the people and things that are gone from us. The second night, we praise what is, marriages included. The third day is for children and things that are only just becoming. So. On the Wedding Night, everyone puts on their dancing vests and we sing and make dirty jokes, and we give our blessings. If your families are from different towns, you might dance in the bride's town one year and her husband's the next, or go up to Wakwaha, where the _wakwade_ are more elaborate, or however you like.”

“Oh...” Amelia subsided, biting her lip. The whole thing sounded terribly scandalous to her, smacking of Dishonor, but when she tried to put her finger on why, she couldn't.

“You know,” Zelgadis said, meditatively, “I kind of like that. It's more....” but he didn't say what it was more of. Amelia watched his jaw tighten as his thoughts turned dark. “In most of the countries inside the Barrier, the ceremony happens at the beginning, and no one seems to care whether that kind of marriage 'grows' or not,” he said. “In the wealthy families, it's all about the property arrangements, and it can amount to nothing more than an officially sanctioned rape with fancy clothes and a band.”

“It's hard to live well in a city,” Wehisho agreed, and stretched her arms above her head in a yawn. “We've all had a difficult day; does anyone want a sleeping potion?”

No one did, but they all took the hint. Wehisho, true to her word, led her mule to lie down next to the sleeping mazoku – ex-mazoku, Amelia corrected herself – and arranged her own bedroll on his other side, starting to hum again. Lina, after a fraught pause, moved her bedroll to be right next to Gourry's.

Amelia and Zelgadis sat up a little longer. Amelia hugged her knees, brooding and stealing glances at Zel. The fire was only coals now; she couldn't make out much of his expression – not that that meant much, with him. But she could see he wasn't looking at her. She berated herself silently. _Just talk to him. You've saved each others lives, you've seen each other naked... this should not be this hard!_ It was, though. “Zel?”

“Princess.” He didn't move.

Amelia nearly burst into tears. “ _Don't call me that!_ ”

He did turn and look at her, at least. His shoulders slumped in a sigh, then tensed again. “But that's the issue, isn't it?” he said, bleakly, “The marriage, as Wehisho would say, has grown. We know how we are with each other, and we both... care... Were you a commoner, it would just be a matter of making sure the little problem we ran into back in Choum Rekwit really was part of the golem, not the demon – and I'll do that experiment _privately,_ thank you –“ (Surely it wasn't possible to hear someone blushing? Amelia wondered) “And then we'd be free to- to choose,” he went on. “But you're a princess, and the final choice is your father's. And I'm still, from the court's point of view, a hired nobody...”

“Oh, but Daddy likes you!” Amelia protested, thinking, _We! He said 'we' could choose!_ “And you're Rezo's grandson and one of the heroes who fought the Zanafar and raised up Taforashia!”

“... and half demon to boot,” Zelgadis went on. “And I don't know if that's something I might pass on to any children I might beget – it's not as if I'm going to be able to experiment with _that_ ahead of time!”

Amelia shrugged. “There are precedents we could use. The royal family of Seyruun has a strong tradition of adopting kids in, which is why none of my uncles look alike. And Daddy's something like a sixteenth troll himself, so...”

Zelgadis went slack with astonishment. “Troll? Really?” He slowly closed his jaw as he thought, and then muttered to himself, “that makes almost too much sense.”

Amelia nodded cheerfully. “The Huldre Trolls of the far North. They're a little different than the ones around here. Not so tusky. Anyway, my point is, it's not so- so hopeless as all that, Zel... chan.”

“Not hopeless, no,” he answered steadily. “But not my decision to make. Or, really, yours. And if Prince Phil says 'no,' I'm leaving Seyruun and not coming back, because at that point our relationship becomes an impediment to you doing what you'll need to. And until we can ask, I'd rather not do anything to make it harder to leave if I have to.”

“Oh, Zel...” Amelia shook her head with fond exasperation and stood up to hug him, leaning her chin into his hair. “I'll never understand you. The world is all so full of love and joy, and you're making yourself gloomy because you think it'll hurt less later. Doesn't work that way, trust me.”

“An expert, are you?” but there was a smile in his voice.

“ _Yes._ ” Amelia plunked herself beside him and grabbed his ears, turning him to face her in the dark. “Aurelia tried that.” Amelia felt Zel stiffen at the mention of her sister's name; it was forbidden to speak it within Seyruun city walls. “After Mother died. She'd only allow herself happiness if it came with guarantees. And we all know how that came out.” The Crown Princess had sworn the Pact with a mazoku and established herself somewhere in Ruginvald. So far as any of her family knew, she _was_ happy, now, sort of. What was left of her.

Zelgadis huffed out a breath. Amelia felt it on her forehead. “I'll bear that in mind,” he said. And when Amelia leaned in to hug him again, he hugged her in return, one hand stroking her hair. “Go to sleep, Mei. We have time.” 

Comforted, Amelia did.

 

****

Xellos lay as still as his human body would let him, the ground beneath him hard and cold even through the cape he had wrapped around him. He lacked the strength of will to ignore the discomfort, but neither did he dwell on it; the physical miseries were all of a piece with the existential anguish, and it all circled restlessly through his mind, unfocused and shifting. He was unable to either concentrate or relax, but somewhere along the line his consciousness moved from a waking state to something else; dream, or trance, or Astral travel- he saw no reason to bother identifying which. 

Swallow's voice moved in and out of hearing, singing or chanting in Kesh. She had been singing the same chant for much of the walk from the site of the spell back to camp, and many of the syllables were nonsense. “Pebble words,” Swallow would call them, syllables so old and worn as to have had all the meaning eroded away. Some of them may have been Words of Power once. Now and then a few Kesh phrases coalesced out of the murmur: “Your feet are on that road.... Welcome to this place, to this time...” The part of him that thought in other languages noticed that “Place” and “time” were actually the same word, inflected slightly differently. Human languages could be so interesting sometimes... An itch prickled under one of his shoulders and the thought escaped.

How had it come to this? How had his triumphant end come to this... ignominy? He had believed himself too disciplined to allow such a deviation from his plan. His implacable, if rarely utilized, will had been one of the factors that raised him above lesser mazouku. His entire being had been bent on achieving a single end, and on welcoming his death. Well, his end had been achieved; the entire Terrestrial Cybernet, known among the humans as the City of Mind, was destroyed in the massive energy pulse that reversed the poles of the earth. His death had not been achieved likewise. Why? What had the error been? Should he have focused the spell through Lina and not Swallow? The circle, not the spiral? But he had needed the spiral to open the spell out until it touched the earth. Left in a circle, the overloaded spell would have simply killed Zelgadis and maybe the others and left yet another glassy crater in the ground. He had needed the deep Kesh feeling for the moment of reversal, when push became pull. _Your feet are on that road,_ Swallow sang.

Maybe it had just been the intervention of the other, human wills. Humans did that; the most dangerous of them could shape reality with the pure stubborn myopia of their perceptions; perhaps since it hadn't occurred to any of the others that he would die, he somehow hadn't. Should he have said something melodramatic when he was teasing control of the spell away from Lina? Something like, “this spell will kill me, but I will have my victory?” _Welcome to here/now, welcome to now/here..._

A crunching noise, disturbingly close to his newly rigid and fragile skull, accompanied by a strong equine whiff and a solid warmth at his back, heralded the arrival of Swallow's mule, Fefinum. He found he knew which particular type of cedar was Fefinum cedar. It didn't smell anything like the mule. But the warmth was welcome as the desert air cooled, especially away from the fire. Xellos stretched his perceptions experimentally. He could still... detect was the word; the sensation was too elusive to qualify as a taste-- he could still detect the two pairs of lovers by the emanations they gave off. Tempered by anxiety and bewilderment of various sorts, their joy was no longer as overpowering as it had been a few hours ago. Nearly bearable, when filtered by human senses. Swallow's emotions were such a fast whirl they looked at a distance like calm; worry, fear, confusion, excitement, determination, curiosity... determination was the top note; she was focused on the practicalities of making camp and caring for an unexpected and underequipped human, and shying away from anything more intense. It was an easy state to manipulate, if only he had the strength to pull it off, which he didn't right now, or a purpose to shape his machinations, which he also lacked. As it was, he merely observed, when he could pull himself out of his own head enough to do so.

Her footsteps neared him again, stopping by his own feet. A moment or two later, another warm thing, the size, perhaps, of a rice pot, was placed near their soles. Swallow took another step or two and then rudely dug around under his cape to grab a gloved hand. She pressed another small, warm thing – a rock, he realized belatedly, against the palm, curled his fingers around it, and then slid a sock over his closed fist and tucked the cape back around him. She found his other hand under his ear and did the same thing. _That's rather clever_ , he decided after a time. _Focused heat sources against the areas where there's a lot of blood flow. Like a hot water bottle, only not._ Swallow wasn't finished. Soft blows here and there on his body indicated additional pieces of fabric were being draped over him. Not blankets; spare clothing or other smaller things. The ground was still hard, but his body began to warm. Swallow stepped away again. Xellos drifted. _Welcome to here/now. Your feet are on that road._

His feet were on nothing at all – supported by a rush of air. His Master stood above him, laughing. The cigarette burned in Her hand. Jewels burned at Her throat, navel, and wrists. Smoke curled around Her flowing, yellow-white hair, her flowing white skirt. She was naked, unadorned save for two copper bobs dangling from one pointed ear. Her paws were empty. A clean, sage-scented wind ruffled her short, dirty-brown fur. The two visions did not contradict each other. They were Her, and he heard Her speak in Her human voice and in a wolf's song:

_WELL, MY SERVANT, so you are here, Two-Legs!_  
_This is quite a mess you have made! YOU HAVE SUCCEEDED IN DESTOYING THE CITY OF MIND._  
_AND HERE YOU ARE, STILL ALIVE! And here you are, still alive!_ _What SHALL I REWARD YOU? are you going to do now?”_

He shook before Her. “Please, Master,” he begged, “I am afraid. We have seen what too close a brush with humanity did to the Chaos Dragon, and even to the piece of Great Lord Shabranigdo whom Lina-San defeated... Please, do not allow me to become a traitor to You!” 

_“be easy, Two-Legs! DO YOU WISH TO END NOW?”_

The question, coming from Her, was a strange one. Never, never in his existence had his desires differed from Hers. “If You think it best,” he said.

_“DO YOU WISH TO END?”_

He thought about it for a while. Even in the realm of chaos, there could be the pull of inertia – he had enjoyed existing so far. He had some curiosity about what this new state of being might teach him. Some small, vindictive piece of him was looking forward to seeing everyone else's reaction when they finally understood just what the Carrion Gyre had done. “Not particularly,” he admitted, “always supposing that I needn't fear rebirth.”

_“What's fear? I WILL CONSUME YOUR SOUL WHEN YOUR HUMAN BODY DIES. IT WILL PROBABLY BE NO MORE THAN FIFTY OR SIXTY YEARS FROM NOW. Yai-ho, yau, Two-legs! Have fun!”_

She was gone. He was lying on the cold, hard ground, between a mule and... he shifted slightly to make sure... it seemed Swallow had set herself on the other side of him. Even the crickets were silent.

_Your feet are on that road. Let your souls begin to make themselves._


	4. Moving outward

Daylight came at last – or too soon, depending on whether one asked Amelia or Lina, and the group prepared to make their way back to Ikul. Xellos proved reluctant to stir from under the laundry pile until Wehisho started to take it apart and put it away. “You need to eat, _binyez,_ ” she chided him, “and we should probably make sure your bladder works the way it's supposed to before we head out. I'd like to look at your feet, too. I know you can walk, but your skin seems delicate for an adult; if your feet don't have any calluses, we should know that ahead of time.”

“Lovely,” Xellos spat, emerging tousled and red-eyed from under his wrinkled and dusty cape, “Just the way I want to wake up in the morning: 'rise and shine and let's find out if you're likely to piss yourself.' ”

“Unless you've changed your mind about dying,” Wehisho went on, sternly, “there are some vaccines we should look into getting for you, too, but they might wait a while. At least until you decide where you're going next.” Xellos growled, but pulled off his boots.

Amelia rubbed her eyes, “Going next? But that's decided, isn't it? Down through the Gate of the Inland Sea, and then east to the Hurricane Coast, and then northeast until we can meet up with the Seyruun merchant fleet, then home.”

“Coyote's Son may not want to accompany you,” Wehisho pointed out.

“But where else would he go?”

“Just about anywhere,” Zelgadis said. He had been pacing in circles, making sporadic moves to pack up camp, but mostly just fidgeting. The prevalence of spiky cheat grass seeds around the campground had seemed much less important when his skin was made of stone. “He could go southwest to the Na valley with Wehisho, for instance, or off north on his own to the Always Fog Coast, or... or down to the south continent the Exchange showed us. Maybe he'll want to come with us partway and stop at Filia's antique shop.” 

Xellos shuddered theatrically at the mention of the dragon's name, and then his expression grew thoughtful. “Hm. Well, it would certainly be unwise for me to return to the Barrier lands. Once word gets out that the Beastmaster's priest has been stripped of magic and trapped in a human body, quite a number of lesser mazoku, not to mention ambitious wannabe heroes, are going to be looking to finish me off. I find... I am less than eager to come to that particular end.” He stared meditatively at his exposed toes, which looked just like ordinary toes, and wiggled them. “Not that it doesn't have its moments of sounding very tempting indeed. In fact...” His voice trailed off. He pulled his boots on again, winced at the popping sounds his joints produced as he stood up, and made his way over to the campfire to help himself to porridge and tea. A few bites and sips later he looked up. “Did one of you scavengers happen to gather the remains of my staff?”

Everyone else looked at Lina, who turned red and jerked indignantly. “What?” She demanded, “It's not like I was gonna just leave something like that lying around for anyone to pick up!” She pulled the top end, with its cracked ruby, out from her cloak. “Did you- uh, want it back, Xellos?”

He shook his head, smiling. “No, no. But I was thinking, if you were inclined to do me a favor, you might show that to Filia. And not correct her if she comes to the conclusion that I am dead. I would much prefer that none of my more... enthusiastic enemies decide it is worthwhile to seek me out beyond the Barrier lands. Dolphin's people are likely to be trouble enough if... if...” he trailed off again. 

Amelia had been preparing an impassioned speech about Justice and Loyalty and the importance of showing compassion even to those who had treated one badly, to make sure Lina didn't forbid Xellos from following them. But the thought of other mazoku gave her pause. Xellos spoke only the truth; he was likely to be a trouble magnet for the rest of his days. And if he was reluctant to join them... but what about Justice for the people he had harmed inside the Barrier lands? Didn't they have the right to confront him? She dithered silently as they began to break camp.

 

***

The mazoku – and whatever his body was doing right now, Zelgadis was certain Xellos was still more mazoku than anything else – had opted to walk, though Wehisho had offered Fefinum. As they all trudged along, Zelgadis brushed his hair out of his eyes again, and then looked distractedly at his hands. The hypersensitivity seemed to be easing a bit; being able to feel his own eyebrows had ceased to be a novelty, which was probably just as well. In the clear daylight, with his nerves finally settling down, it was easier to assess his current condition. The hands in front of his eyes were the familiar shape and color, right down to the purplish bits that had once been crystalline studs of stone. Now those spots were flesh, indistinguishable in texture from the rest of his hand, except for being raised slightly, like certain kinds of birthmarks, or moles. The hand itself.... “Amelia?”

She was at his side almost instantly. “Yes, Zel-san, what is it?” 

He reached out and took her hand, running his fingers along the back of it, and ignored the blush this raised in her cheeks. “I'm just trying to figure out... is my skin the normal texture for a human's, or... or not?”

“Oh.” Amelia pulled herself together. “Um.” Her brows went down in concentration, and she ran her fingers along the back of Zel's hand as he had along hers. Zelgadis had to suppress his own pleasurable shiver. _Later. Maybe._ “Not quite,” Amelia concluded, “But it's hard to explain exactly how they're different. Yours is... not rougher, but it has maybe a little less give. And it has a, a kind of a grain to it. Like certain types of leather.”

“Ah. Thank you.” Zelgadis sighed, then deliberately smiled. It felt stiff and false, but he held the expression a few instants even so. “Still a great improvement over stone, for everything except turning away arrows.”

“Well, I think so,” Amelia agreed stoutly, “Are... how are you doing?”

Zel was silent for a while, thinking. “Better than I... expected, given the... the incompleteness,” he said at last. “I actually wonder if the ritual really did help heal my 'souls,' as Wehisho puts it – why more than one, I wonder? – but... something inside has come unstuck, it feels like.”

Amelia started to say, “good,” and then went cold. “I... I'm glad you're all right, but I hope... We've always said a soul is the one thing magic can't touch. Souls can be trapped, or suppressed, but not altered. If there's something out here in the West that changes that...”

“That's why I said 'ritual,' not 'spell.' I don't think it was the magic, exactly.” 

“...Oh.” They walked on. This was, Amelia realized, one of those Zelgadis sort of thoughts, where the line between two different things, like a magic spell and a folk tradition, suddenly became very thin. And wiggly. Lina-san did that kind of thing, too, and Xellos. It always made her feel acutely uncomfortable and homesick. She would long for the clear, black-and-white rules of Seyruun, right up until they got there, when it would all seem too flat and simple. Amelia sighed.

 

*****

Of course, Lina could never actually _tell_ Gourry how glad she was that he was there beside her. Or do anything as obvious as take his arm and cling to it like a limpet. Talking to Gourry usually went badly, at least when she did it. She got mad, or he got hurt, or something, every time. And somehow, words were too... too public. As if there were an invisible audience out there watching her every move, and she had to be funny, or heroic, or insouciant, every second. _Well, I am, but even so, a girl – woman – has the right to relax now and then, right?_ The – _you can admit it, Lina_ – the love that had grown between them had been almost entirely wordless, all along. She certainly didn't remember much talking from the night that had put them in their current situation... and she wanted to do that again as soon as... should she wait until they were married? From what Wehisho had said, it might be quite a while before they could make that happen. Well, but she wanted to have a proper inn with doors that closed, at least. And in the meantime...

“I've been thinking,” Gourry said, “That unless the trip back goes a lot faster than the trip out, there's no way we'll get back to Seyruun before you, uh,” he turned red. “Before the baby's born. Maybe we should stop at that town where... what's her name again? Tall, hits people with a mace for no reason... likes tea... you know who I mean – maybe we should stop there. I should be able to find work as a smith... and then we could go on again after that and decide where we want our home base to be.”

“Filia,” Lina supplied darkly. Why did the man have to keep _saying_ things? If they just... just kept going, and did what they did, it was fine. When they talked... “Her name is Filia.” After another hundred yards or so, she added, grudgingly, “that might be OK. I just... I don't know anything right now.” She blinked back tears – _no reason to cry- gotta be the pregnant-lady crazies_ – “I'm sure it'll be fine, though,” she lied.

“Of course it will be.” Gourry reached over and squeezed her shoulder briefly. Lina caught his hand and clung like a limpet.

 

****

Swallow concentrated on the slight rasp of the cord that dangled against her breasts under her tunic, and the bounce of the hand-sized, carved bone pendant that hung from it, tapping her slightly above the navel. The pendant was finely worked: the carved lines of the maps it carried were thin as linen thread and picked out in black. One side was a map of the Inland Sea and the rivers that flowed into it. The other side held a map of the Na valley. Most Finders carried maps of home with them; choosing to carry the Inland Sea with her as well had been an act of defiance. She'd been claiming a place in the wide world independent of tight, insular Tachas Touchas, with its houses all butted up against each other until a single curve of drainpipe could span their roofs, parochial even by valley standards. But now, she wanted more than anything to go home at last. 

The oddly-colored foreigners who had been her companions for the last few moons suddenly looked as alien to her as on the first day they had all run into each other. She should have stuck with her original plan and left them all behind in Choum-Rekwit. Or sooner than that. She should have found a boat headed west from the Deep Rock harbor and let them find themselves another guide. Even then, she'd been homesick; she'd spent half a year among the Klatsaand people with only occasional letters through the Exchange to keep in contact with the Na valley; far, far longer than most Finders went out. Even then, she'd felt herself in danger of getting lost, of coming unmoored from her kin-soul and becoming someone who belonged nowhere. Now she had gone even further out than that. She had changed – or been changed – enough that, were this the valley, she would be starting to look for a different name to answer to. Or maybe not. Visionaries took bird names, too, like Finders. 

She could only bear to glance at this seeping dread in passing. She ran her finger again over her new scar; surely, if she were branded on her cheek with the heyiaya-if, that meant she hadn't been condemned to... Her deepest terror trudged beside her, borrowing her hat against the sun. He was carried, it seemed to Swallow, who felt the pull of it, by an icy current that sprang from his own ancient heart; a cold that first shocked, then numbed, then ached. She had imagined, in the first giddy moments when they had all spun their way out of Coyote's house and returned to the Five Houses of Earth, that she might bring him with her to talk to the scholars at Wakwaha – a novelty, a puzzle, someone who, unlike a baby, had come into the Five Houses with memories intact. But he was also, Swallow reminded herself, a warrior, and a plague-carrier thereby. His head was on backward, and he was clever. He could twist other people with the sheer stubborn myopia of his perceptions, and then the Sickness of Man, the hoarding sickness that gathered power rather than letting it flow, would be on them again. She had, perhaps, imagined that coming to the valley would be a comfort to him as it was to her, but if she brought someone that dangerous with her, she risked sharing his... she forced herself to think the word clearly _. Exile._

 

****

When they stopped to eat and to water Fefinum, Lina tried again to prod Xellos into explaining himself. “Why did you think it was worth losing your power to butt in like that, huh? Or did you not think that was going to happen?”

Xellos shrugged and swallowed a gulp of water. “I did not expect my existence to continue beyond the climax of the spell,” he said. “When I realized I was still here, it worried me, because I was afraid my other ends had not been achieved either.”

“And what were those other ends, exactly?”

He grinned, looking for an instant like his old, irritating self. “You'll find out soon enough, I expect.”

Lina's warning growl was interrupted by a bang and a startled squawk from Wehisho. Everyone turned to stare at her, and found her staring in turn at a small crater in the dirt with a wisp of smoke rising and then vanishing from the center.

“I smell shrimp,” Gourry announced, confusedly.

“What was that, Wehisho-san?” Amelia squeaked.

Wehisho's hair stood nearly straight out from her head, and she panted a little. Her eyes were wide and panicked-looking. Her voice, when she answered, was a breathy half octave above its usual tone. “It was a scorpion a couple of heartbeats ago.”

Xellos stopped grinning. His face took on an alert expression, and he frowned slightly.

“So I guess Wehisho-san really did get magic powers from that spell-thing yesterday?” Gourry looked around at the others, waiting to be corrected.

“Must be,” Zelgadis agreed. “I thought at first that she'd just picked up a few residuals as the spell went through – and maybe a little increased sensitivity on the Astral level as well. But if the effects were temporary they should have dissipated by now.” Zel pulled out his dowsing crystal and dangled it over the scorpion's remains. Amelia and Lina pressed up to Wehisho, peering at her while she shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot.

“So I can tell she's more connected at the Astral level,” Lina said after a few minutes, “but where's the power coming from?”

“From him,” Wehisho answered shortly, tilting her head at Xellos, who had drifted closer, still frowning thoughtfully.

Lina growled in frustration. “That's not really what she meant, Wehisho-san,” Amelia explained. “Um, that is, yes, it seems to be because of Xellos-san that you have magic now, but... When humans do spells, we're channeling power that comes from other entities – anything from the spirits of the air to- to the Lord of Nightmares or the Healing Mother. But you haven't learned any spells and we don't know where the power came from to toast that scorpion.”

“That's not what I meant, either,” Wehisho retorted. “I mean, his grief rises in me like water, and flows out again – or, it was more like a squirt, just now – where I aim it.”

“That... sounds almost like mazoku magic,” said Zel, perturbed. “Are we sure they didn't – I don't know – switch places somehow?”

Lina sprang over and put Xellos in a headlock, pulling on one of his cheeks. “If you've turned Wehisho into one of you I'm gonna-”

Xellos gargled. “Please, gh- Lina-san- that actually _hurts_ now-” 

“Nothing you don't deserve.” Lina bored a knuckle into the side of his scull, making him yelp.

Zelgadis ignored them, instead asking Wehisho, “What about the rest of us? Can you get anything from our emotions?”

Wehisho had calmed down, except for her hair, which looked like it might start emitting sparks. She rubbed the scar on her cheek, thinking. “I can sense them,” she said, at last, “Warmer for happy ones, colder for the others. And all kinds of little... colors? Or flavors? … All kinds of subtleties, anyway, that might mean something to me if I'd been doing this for a long time instead of one night and day. But...” She let her eyes half close, and the scar grew whiter, then she looked up again. “I can't really do anything with them; they're wind, not water. There's no... I can feel that wind, but I don't have a windmill; I only have a... Xellos called it a channel, yesterday. It's almost like another set of veins, that I can open and close.”

Xellos looked up from Lina's headlock, too intent on Wehisho to bother freeing himself from the sorceress' slackening grip. “So, rather more like a Pact, then,” he mused, “In a not-at-all-like-a-Pact kind of way...”

“A what?” Wehisho and Gourry said together.

Lina refrained from pounding Gourry, who really should have known what a Pact was by this time, jellyfish or not, only because, of course, Wehisho didn't and couldn't have. “Sometimes a human will make a bargain with a mazoku,” she explained, “Where the Mazoku extends the human's lifespan and gives them extra powers. Sometimes the mazoku literally becomes part of the human's body.”

“And what does the mazoku get?” Wehisho asked.

“The human's soul, eventually.”

“Also,” Xellos added brightly, “The mazoku who agree to a Pact tend to be of the lesser kind. If they choose the right thrall and handle them carefully, they can gain enough influence on this plane to counterbalance their deficiencies elsewhere.”

Wehisho looked at him. “And how is this different?”

Xellos shrugged. “To begin with, we neither one of us agreed to this ahead of time. Furthermore, rather than gaining power that a mazoku chooses to give you, you have instead gained the ability to gather power in the mazoku way yourself, together, it seems, with the attendant senses. But only in a very limited way. Even so, it's more freedom of choice than an actual thrall would be allowed. We will doubtless discover more variations, in time. Certainly,” he added with a sharp glance at Lina, “there does not appear to be any question of you actually becoming a mazoku. That's not done.”

“No?” Amelia asked, suspiciously.

Xellos stood up and brushed himself off. “Turning a human into a purely astral being makes about as much sense as trying to forge their blood into an iron tool. Far more trouble than it's worth, and a waste of resources besides, when humans cause so much chaos as they are.”

This answer was far from reassuring. Lina, Zel, and Amelia started to huddle together, buzzing amongst themselves about what additional magical tests they could conduct with the equipment available, which was minimal. Finally, Wehisho asked pointedly if this meant they were all making camp again. “If so, we're going to be on short rations soon, and we wouldn't be able to supplement since there's not much to hunt or gather out here except sage and scorpions and grasshoppers. I've had scorpion once or twice; I think it's the kind of thing you have to grow up with.” At this reminder, the mages sighed and gave over. Zelgadis took sightings and consulted their map, just in case they'd managed to lose their direction again. Fefinum brayed her complaint at having to leave the nice cool waterhole, and everyone plodded forward.

The magical consultation continued as they walked, with Wehisho and Gourry listening in and trying to understand, but it eventually ebbed into silence. Without a lab and a reference library, most of the available channels of investigation for the phenomenon of Wehisho (or Xellos, for that matter) amounted to “wait and see.” Especially since Xellos refused to volunteer any additional information. He didn't even tease them with hints that he knew something they didn't. He just walked, and then, after an hour, asked querulously if he could please ride Fefinum for a bit, after all. After that, he sat drooping under his borrowed hat, eyes closed. 

 

***

After another hour, he straightened abruptly enough to make Fefinum sidle in discomfort, cleared his throat, and said, “Are you quite sure we want to head directly back to Ikul?”

Lina glared at him suspiciously. “Why wouldn't we?”

“I just thought it might be a bit risky, under the circumstances.”

Zelgadis snorted. “Why risky? It's a half-dozen little houses on stilts, with no weapons stronger than a crossbow and no mages but us within a thousand miles.”

Amelia nodded. “They might not want to give us dinner this time, after how much Lina-san and Gourry-san got through last time, but I don't see them being dangerous.”

Xellos shrugged. “That is certainly one way of looking at it. However, if they have concluded that we are dangerous, we might find ourselves dodging those crossbow bolts sooner rather than later. It might be simpler to choose another landing point, if Swallow-san can recommend one.” He tilted his head inquiringly at Wehisho.

“Why would they think that?” Amelia shrugged. “I mean, other than Lina-san. We were polite, we brought food, I even healed that one guy's leg when he fell off the balcony.”

Xellos' smile was as broad and blank as ever. “You may be right. The simple people of Ikul would probably never make any connection between a lot of hungry strangers barreling off to the forbidden monument of the Caldera God and the sudden... event that flips compasses and skews everyone's sense of direction, to say nothing of the other effects.”

“Which are?” Zelgadis asked, but Wehisho interrupted him.

“Maybe I'll go ahead of the rest of you, then,” she said, “and see if I can talk my way in. Ikul has the Exchange around here, and I want to...”

Xellos' smile broadened into a white grin. “Not anymore, it doesn't,” he sang.

Everyone stared blank-faced at Xellos, who sat jaunty and careless on his borrowed mule, under his borrowed hat. “Ikul does not have an exchange,” he explained, “And neither does anyone else. We've destroyed them all.”

“I don't believe you.” Zel's voice was flat.

Xellos shrugged, still relaxed. “Yes, you do. You know I don't lie. The technical explanations get enormously complicated if you don't know much about electricity, but it's true. Living creatures generate their own magnetic fields and electrical currents as needed, but the exchanges and their machines used the ambient field of the earth itself, and when we reversed that, we fried their circuits. All of them. Everywhere. The City of Mind,” he concluded, “has had a stroke, and died.”

 

***

The enormity of it all but flattened his audience. Xellos found himself savoring the familiar sequence of emotions as they filtered up through the shock. Horror first, then a more creeping dread as the longer-term implications began to sink in, anger, of course, at being fooled, used to such an end... _It's that moment again,_ he thought. _The one where Sairaag falls, where the Sword of Light is stolen away, where the Zanaffar is on the move, where Rezo opens his eyes. Only this time, there is absolutely nothing you can do to change it. This time, it is truly and finally too late._ The sweetness of it all was dizzying, like falling into a pool of lilac scent. The back of his mouth filled with the taste of honey. 

At the same time, though, something was different; as though the honey were starting to ferment. His human body was tensing, his heart beating faster. He was starting to sweat, very slightly. The body was responding with something like fear. Some small, detached part of himself watched this with interest, but then the sweet anger flooded, nearly choking him, and a sudden, physical blow hit him in the chest, knocking him off Fefinum's back to the ground. Swallow stood over him, her scar blazing white with power, the whites of her eyes beginning to glow even as her tears flowed. Blasts of raw power pummeled him like hail as she swore at him. _Vile,_ she called him, and _twisted-neck,_ and _murderer,_ and _outermost._ Xellos simply endured, secure in his victory. He didn't greatly care if he lived or died, and Swallow's new powers were mazoku powers; she could no more rebuild even a single machine with them than she could heal a wound. She could only destroy.

The rain of abuse ended quite abruptly, on a great, heaving sob, and then, to Xellos' not-surprise, Swallow mounted Fefinum herself and sent the mule trotting firmly away from their planned direction; nearly due southwest. Fefinum's hooves thumped in the dust, and the girl and her mount had shrunk to miniatures in the distance before Amelia recovered enough to cry, “Wait! Wehisho-san! Wait!”

Lina, wiser than the princess in the ways of people in the first grip of strong emotion, patted Amelia's shoulder. “Let her go,” she advised. “Wehisho knows more about surviving in this kind of country than we do; she'll be fine, even if she doesn't come back. But she probably will.”

“We're not that far from Ikul, really,” Zelgadis agreed, “And we were pretty much planning to part ways there, anyway. Too bad it ended this way, though.” Amelia and Gourry sighed agreement.

Xellos rubbed his jarred shoulder. “Well, she didn't kill me. I thought she might.”

“I still might,” Lina growled.

Xellos shrugged, dusted himself off, and stood up. They both knew she wouldn't.

 

***

In the event, the people of Ikul were not nearly so unwelcoming as they could have been. This reprieve was due, largely, to ignorance. The Ikulti thought their exchange had gone black due to some kind of interruption of power from the underground (and underwater) cables that supplied it, and that the pings would be along any day now to fix it. They didn't use compasses; to them the reversal of the poles meant only that their tame flocks of ducks seemed more inclined to get lost than usual, and ducks could be like that. Lina and the rest of them heaved very stealthy sighs of relief. “I think we need to get out of here quickly, though,” Amelia said, to nods from the others. “All it would take is one or two wrong words and...” She drew a line across her neck with her finger. 

“I agree completely, Amelia-san,” Xellos chirped. “The situation is very precariously balanced.”

Lina looked at him sideways. “You're not planning to say anything, are you?”

Xellos grinned wider. “Lina-san, are you asking me if I can keep a secret?” But then, as she glared at him, he let his head droop again and rubbed at his forehead. “I actually intend to spend as much of the next few hours as I can manage sleeping. You have no idea how exhausting it is, adapting your mind to handle an entirely new variety of sensory input.”

“Wanna bet?” Zel asked.

“No.”

But while Xellos maintained a perfect discretion when it came to the fate of the exchange, he still made trouble. It started that night, when, without ever waking up enough to respond to the others' cuffs or whispers, he muttered and shifted constantly, making the already uncomfortably bumpy bamboo floors creak as he rolled over again and again. (The Ikulti slept in hammocks, and guests were expected to bring their own.) When they got up in the morning, they found Xellos had more or less wedged himself against the southwest wall of their stilted hut, with his clothes catching on the ends of some of the reeds of the floor where they butted up against the reeds of the wall.

He apologized profusely. He even went so far as to volunteer an explanation: “It seems to be a residual effect of the Carrion Gyre and the link between Swallow-san and myself. When I'm unconscious, my body is inclined to move itself closer to her, as if in pursuit of the missing part of itself. I expect the urge will abate with time.” The others looked at each other. _How much time?_

The answer proved to be: more than one day, at least. Xellos did not complain. He turned his hands to whatever chores were asked of him, silently and mostly competently, though he proved completely inept at rolling bedrolls into compact bundles. (“It's been some centuries since I had to,” he shrugged.) When the five of them needed to bargain for a boat to take them back through the marshes, he'd pulled the gold clasp with its three cracked rubies off the front of his cloak and added it to the pile of coins Lina was offering. When it came time to climb aboard the rickety-looking craft- it was constructed primarily out of woven reeds, set atop pontoons made of bundled reeds -, Xellos managed without a stumble or a backward glance. Nonetheless, his forehead remained marked by shallow frown lines, and as they took their places, he showed a remarkable ability to ease himself over to the southwesternmost side of the raft, no matter which direction the marsh channels were taking them at the moment.

They spent that night on a small islet, only marginally drier than their porous reed raft. Zelgadis took the first watch, patrolling the edge of their anti-mosquito spell, since his part-demon skin seemed to repel them. A couple of hours in, he heard Xellos' voice, clear and quite indignant, saying something unintelligible. Xellos had deliberately chosen the northeastern corner of their sleeping ground “so I don't roll into the water,” he said, and now he sat bolt upright, then stood up and strode forward. Since he made no attempt to clear his bedroll first, he tripped immediately and landed flat on his face, draped half over Gourry, with one outflung arm hitting Lina in the chest.

The two of them came awake immediately, and Lina took prompt retributive action. The force behind her slap woke the sleepwalker at last, and her shouts of “Pervert! Stupid, pervey Pervert!” woke Amelia. 

Xellos apologized steadily through the ensuing uproar and then sighed. “I really don't know what to do about this,” he said. 

“Go find Wehisho?” Lina suggested. From the sound of it, she would not be above sending him right then, in the dark and without a boat, through the marshes. 

“She,” Xellos informed them, “is moving further away as we speak, though she's going to have to stop soon if she's still got her mule with her. I think she has made it clear that I am not welcome in her company, and I can't imagine she's any less eager to snap this bond than I am.”

The others looked at each other dubiously. It didn't look to them like the bond was in any danger of snapping. Gourry suddenly brightened. “I know!” he announced, “Zel, lend me that rope of yours, will you? When Zelgadis complied, Gourry drew his sword and looped the rope around the pommel. Then, with a bellow, Gourry plunged the sword down into the mud of the island, clear up to the hilt. “There! It's a picket line, Xellos, like Wehisho did for her mule. We'll just tie the other end around your ankle and then you can sleepwalk all you want.”

Everyone boggled a bit at this. Gourry's thought process, such as it was, could be a lot to take in. To say nothing of the display of pure strength that had converted his sword into a stake. “Well,” Zelegadis admitted, “it won't do anything about the muttering, but it's something.”

Xellos tilted his head. “I was talking in my sleep, too? Did I say anything interesting?”

“Not unless the phrase “Vana puvyai gedoto” means anything to you.

“Not yet, you stupid ewe-sheep,” Xellos translated automatically, and then blinked and fingered his chin. “So, when I talk in my sleep, I speak Kesh. Oh, dear.” He took the end of Gourry's picket rope himself, and tied it very tightly around his ankle. He even took his boots off first. Next morning, they found him sleeping stretched out full length, head pointed southwest, with the rope stretched out like a tripwire and the sword tilted slightly off-center in its slot in the ground.

 

***

The “snap” Xellos had anticipated occurred the next day. Or, _a_ snap, anyway. Gourry and Zel had been manning the poles on their reed raft, with Amelia scampering back and forth, providing ballast and balance in the subtly shifting currents of the marshes. Lina, milking her newly-announced pregnancy for all it was worth, stretched out in the middle of the platform and dozed, or, worse, chatted about how wonderful and relaxing the ride was while the others sweated. Xellos, too was sweating, though not moving or chatting. He huddled in a tight ball, head buried in his arms, with the capelet of his cloak flipped over his head in a vain attempt to keep out the light. He whimpered, steadily and softly: a high whine that, when it didn't stop after she hit him, Lina tried to pretend was another insect somewhere out in the marshes.

Around mid-morning, Xellos sprang upright with a howl and leaped off the side of the raft, plunging through the reeds in as straight a line as he could manage, pulled by his internal compass. The violence of his departure set the raft rocking so hard that Gourry, too, fell into the marsh, and then, with a horrible inevitability, the rest of them. Freed of its burden, the raft then wallowed further up out of the muddy water, dousing its erstwhile passengers in a couple of small waves as it righted itself. The water was only five feet deep or so, but it was enough to make scrambling up onto the slippery bank of the channel difficult. Lina ran out of patience and cast Levitation, and then shrieked as her power surged unexpectedly, taking her about thirty feet higher than she'd meant to go. Then she shrieked again, louder, at the leeches she found clinging to her boots. In the hubbub that followed, it took nearly an hour before they were in a position to do anything about Xellos.

Once the mud settled, though, Gourry stayed with the raft and the other three simply followed the broad swath of broken reeds southwest until they found the spot where Xellos, muddy, wild-eyed, and panting, was yanking his cloak free of the thornbush in which it had become entangled. Zelgadis settled the matter with a couple of sword strokes, and plucked Xellos and such pieces of the thornbush as chose to accompany them into the air. The ex-mazoku dangled limply, exhausted, for a moment, then convulsed in an eardrum-shattering shriek when Zel tried to float them northeast. Zelgadis sighed and bowed to the inevitable. “Fine. Let's find Wehisho then.”

They had to fly; Xellos could not bear any route that took him off-point enough to weave their way through the marshes. They stayed as low to the ground as they could, conserving power. Lina, Amelia, and Zelgadis took it in turn to carry their trembling passenger, who was steering them more west than south now, and starting to breathe a little more easily. “It's less than a mile, now; I think... I think she's coming to meet us.”

They found her on top of a sage-covered bluff, leaning against a cottonwood tree, looking exhausted. Even her curling hair looked limp, and her eyes, when she slowly raised her head to look at them, were hollow and set in dark rings. “So you are here, Xellos,” Wehisho said.

When Lina set him down on the bluff, Xellos all but teleported the last few yards to the tree. He and Wehisho clung to each other like lovers, bodies pressed together, and then sprang apart again, to regard each other with matching wry smiles. Xellos looked around. “Where's Fefinum?” he asked.

Wehisho shrugged. “About a day's walk from here; maybe a little further. I left her picketed with some of the Sensh people this morning.”

“You got an early start, then,” he observed in a neutral voice.

“Yes,” Weshisho shifted uncomfortably. “Also.” She stopped again, took a breath. “It turns out, the bond that allows me to draw power from you is not much weakened by distance. If you're miserable enough, I can fly.”

“Dear me!” Xellos abruptly sat down and began to snicker, shaking his head. He sat there laughing for the next half a minute or so, while the others looked at him quizzically, and then pulled himself together again and stood up. “So,” he said quietly, “Where do we go from here?”

“West,” Wehisho said immediately, “and south, to Wakwaha-on-the-mountain. What else is there to do but go on together?” She looked dubiously at his thornbush-bedecked cape. “I don't suppose you brought your gear with you? If you were able to get a hold of any in Ikul?” Wordlessly, Zel handed her the bundle they'd managed to assemble. It was wet and muddy, having been fished out of the marsh when the raft capsized, but it was better than nothing. Wehisho accepted it without comment. 

“Wehisho-san,” Amelia quavered, “We can't go to Wakwaha. We have to hurry to the Hurricane Coast and see if we can find a Wu-Dun-san to fulfill the prophecy--” (The others sighed- Amelia had decided that since Justice always Prevailed in the end, and the Exchange had been destroyed, the Exchange could not have been the wudun they were seeking.) “--and then get home.”

Wehisho nodded gravely. “ _Han oya,_ then, Amelia-bin. May your journey be easy. But I-” she looked sideways at Xellos, leaning against the cottonwood trunk – “ _we_ are going to Wakwaha.” She blew out her breath in a sigh. “Possibly after a short nap,” she added.

And just like that, the time had come to part ways. Lina stretched, then shook hands with Wehisho and, after a moment's hesitation, Xellos. Amelia hugged Wehisho and clapped Xellos firmly on the shoulder. “Now that you aren't a mazoku, you can truly understand the transcendent power of Love, Xellos-san. You should spend the rest of your human life fighting for Justice and making up for all the horrible things you did as a mazoku.” Xellos looked at her through narrowed eyes, head tilted to one side, and said nothing.

Zelgadis ignored Xellos entirely but bowed gravely to Wehisho. “Thank you,” he said, “for sharing the spell that purged the golem from me, and for your friendship and wisdom these last few months. I owe you... a great deal, and I will not forget that.” He cast a dubious glance at his princess, lecturing under the cottonwood tree, and another at her victim. “Good luck,” he added. “You're going to need it.”

Wehisho nodded in return. “Yes,” she said.

 

_So make and break the circle_  
_Take and loose my hand_  
_Love and leave me dancing_  
_All in the Western Land_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Making the Gyre," copyright 1985, by Ursula K. LeGuin. Used without permission.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, folks,
> 
> I'm very close (finally) to being done with the sequel to this fic, involving Human!Xellos and Wehisho in the Na Valley, but if someone is interested, I very much need, no so much a beta reader as an epsilon reader: Not so much someone for spelling and grammar as someone to help me figure out pacing and decide which scenes need deleteing and so on. If interested, please leave a comment here or pm me from ff.net - my username there is the same as here.


End file.
